Healthcare Design - August 2015 - 31

vice president of operations for Balfour Beatty (Dallas),
adding that having estimators readily available to the
team was an added bonus. "It was an ideal setup in
that you could iterate a lot of different options and
price them out as we went."
As it did with the design, the size of Parkland
dictated how the construction was approached,
particularly in thinking about what could be prefabricated off-site to speed construction as well as what
modular pieces could be used to take advantage of
the repetition and scale of the building components.
"We knew that Parkland had so many repeating elements, so we said we ought to push the limit on this,"
Massey says. "We sat down with our design partners
and we first looked at the list of things we could
prefab. We came up with about 15 items and then
sorted them by what we could gain by doing that."

From the ground up
While the story of the New Parkland Hospital is
steeped in planning and design feats, the construction team behind the project brought it to life. And
it all started when two competitors in the Dallas
market, Balfour Beatty Construction and Austin
Commercial, decided to take a chance and team up
for the first time to go after the Parkland contract together, a move they hoped would differentiate them
from the competition by presenting both national
healthcare expertise and a local team.
And it worked. The two additionally partnered with
H.J. Russell & Co. (Chicago) and Azteca Enterprises
Inc. (Dallas) to form what's known as BARA, the
general contractor and construction manager joint
venture on the project, led by Balfour Beatty. The
project used an integrated project delivery (IPD) approach with early involvement of BARA but without a
formal IPD contract.
The team soon decided to become completely
assimilated as opposed to divvying up pieces of the
project between the individual companies, peaking
at 62 professional staff and a workforce of 1,400
on-site. "You couldn't tell the difference in who was
with what company. Many didn't know. There was
no line of demarcation or responsibilities," describes
Sam Moses, general superintendent for BARA and
superintendent with Balfour Beatty (Dallas). "Everyone worked together and it was the right way to do
it. Nothing was left behind."
Part of that success was an early decision by
Parkland to have the design and construction teams
working together in a colocation office on the site.
"We were able to do it, and it worked beyond our
expectations. You can solve problems really quickly,
because everyone is there under one roof," says Walt
Massey, project executive on the project and senior

When all was said and done, three primary pieces
were chosen: patient bathrooms, overhead mechanical/electrical racks, and the patient room headwalls.
The exterior glass curtain wall of the building was
also prefabricated off-site.
Another success in the project delivery was the bid
procurement process. The size of Parkland allowed
packages to be broken up. For example, there were
two glazing contractors, three drywall contractors,
and two painters. "That helped with production
and not overloading one with the quantity of work,"
Moses says. Plus, it allowed more companies to
compete for jobs, which drove down costs.
But when it comes to construction innovation, the
60-foot cantilever on Parkland takes the cake. "We
all had our doubts on that, but I'm so glad we did it.
I've been with the company for 37 years and it's absolutely the coolest thing I've been associated with,"
Moses says. "The planning that went into it, you just
don't do that in our world. You do it on bridges and
things of that nature, but we don't get to have a cantilever and then build on top of it. It was phenomenal."
The cantilever planning took a year, complete with
biweekly meetings to postulate theories on how to
make it work and then shoot holes in them. "We went
through everything we ever dreamed up that could
have or has been an issue in the past on something
similar, because no one had done anything like this,"
Moses describes. "The execution was almost easy
after we did all that planning."
And being integrated early on in the project and
immersed in the team as a whole thanks to the
colocation office helped the builders understand
why all of those striking architectural features were
actually quite necessary. "You get to understand how
those design elements came to be and it helped us
understand the context, and then you get on board
with making it happen," Massey says.
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Healthcare Design - August 2015

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