UNM Health Sciences Center

by Neal Singer

Any building that will need room for robot medical patients is bound to be a bit unusual in construction and layout.

The $49 million University of New Mexico's Health Sciences Center Education Building is such a building. The four-story complex will be home to students in medicine, pharmacy and nursing when it opens in the fall.

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And as part of their training, students will treat robot patients programmed to display certain fluids, blood pressures, temperatures and symptoms. They'll be able to watch the robot's reaction to see if they have cured, harmed or killed it.

The building will include a sunken, open-air cafeteria and food court, which will be protected from the sun by vined trellises during the summer and remain open during the winter. A bookstore, common study spaces, 300-seat auditorium, small gym, outdoor musical performances on a small stage and even a museum on the building's top floor will offer opportunities to students of different but allied fields to mix and learn each other's problems.

Separate entrances and dual pathways for incoming patients and student professionals keep the two groups from crossing each other's paths. There also will be a 45-ft.-deep pedestrian tunnel constructed between the center and a building housing the Office of the Medical Investigator. The tunnel will be used for the transport of cadavers, said construction manager Eric Schwaner of general contractor Flintco West Inc.

Flintco is headquartered in Tulsa, Okla., and has offices around the U.S., including Albuquerque. The firm specializes in large public buildings that include hospitals, schools, prisons, courthouses and Indian casinos.

Consistent with the theme of housing various professions under one roof, each floor of the complex has a different exterior: stone, cement, metal and stucco, said principal architect Bill Sabatini of Dekker/Perich/Sabatini, which has offices in Albuquerque, Las Vegas and Amarillo.

Benjamin Gardner, project coordinator for Dekker/Perich/Sabatini, said most of the 48,000-sq.-ft. first phase of the 165,000-sq.-ft. project is complete. The $17 million first phase, begun in June 2005, is expected to be completed by September. Start date for the rest of the project is not yet set.

The most expensive part of the new building's exterior is made of composite metal panels, Schwaner said. The panels have lips and sockets that fit together and are sized specifically for each project so that no cutting is involved.

Water runs down the channel between the panels and its aluminum backing. The panels, which cost $75 per sq. ft., are not expected to dry out or rust.

Tactile, 18- by 18-in. sandstone in 2-in.-thick slabs, will form one side of a walkway that traverses the complex and will help students find their way.

The built-up underside of an upper patio will be filled with Geofoam, which weights about 10 lbs. per cu. ft. rather than dirt's 120 lbs. per cu. ft., reducing the load on a nearby retaining wall so that its width can be reduced from 10 ft. to 5, Schwaner said.

Accordion fire curtains, built of aluminum, will be installed on curved ceiling tracks on every level of the building's north staircase, which has no separate fireproof structure to house it along the building's northern glass wall. The fire curtains - 28 ft. long and 10 ft. tall - cost slightly more than $100,000, Schwaner said.

A western stairwell is itself a fire escape, with a separate door and housing.

The building will be cooled by unusually large air-conditioning ducts about 18 in. in diameter. "UNM standards require no more than 400 cu. ft. per minute [for quietness of operation]," Schwaner added. "Typical standards are 800 to 1,000 cfm."

Building piles are augur cast. A large augur shovels out earth, cement is pumped in as the drill bit is pulled out and a rebar cage is pushed down through the cement before it sets.

"We use a liquefying agent that makes the cement really liquid but sets up in an hour," Schwaner said.

Landscape planters along a step wall will surround a courtyard of approximately 10,000 sq. ft., creating a "garden of healing," he added. A small performance space even has a grill storage space built into a courtyard wall.

The building's auditorium will be changed to fit many uses through two motorized line shafts that raise and lower banks of light fixtures to the desired height above the audience, said project manager Mike Kingham of Stagecraft Industries of Portland, Ore.

Variations in lighting will illuminate lecturers for video or TV or change visual emphasis to accommodate theater or music.

There were some hurdles in the construction process.

"There were sewer lines in the way of a utility tunnel that the plans didn't indicate," said Graeme Means, a civil engineer for Albuquerque-based Jeff Mortenson and Associates. "We had to go snooping around to find them."

His detective work saved project time and money by lowering the tunnel a few feet on plan specs.

The small building space, hemmed in by other buildings on UNM's north campus, caused headaches for Lillian Santillanes, project manager for Albuquerque-based Structural Services Inc., which erected the building's steel.

"It was cramped and a little frustrating, with concrete [walls on an upper floor being] poured during the middle of the project that steel needed to bear on," she said.

And then, because of the variety of materials used, the building was always crowded with workers.

"We had to have a crane with a lot of boom on it to reach from the outside from the building, rather than building from the inside out as we usually do," Santillanes said.

She added that her group "worked lots of Saturdays" because then the building was less crowded.

Her company, one of the largest steel erectors in the state, finished without delays.

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