Downtown Learning

ASU College of Nursing Teaches Lesson of Density to Phoenix Core

ASU’s College of Nursing and Health Innovation Phase II packs sustainability, higher education and urban revitalization into a striking copper cube.

By Scott Blair

Demand for nurses throughout Arizona and the U.S. has led to a doubling of enrollment in Arizona State University’s College of Nursing and Health Innovation in just a few years.

Each facade of the ASU College of Nursing and Health Innovation Phase II building has a different configuration as an energy-saving response to the desert environment. The exterior also serves to welcome visitors to downtown Phoenix with an emphatic architectural statement. (Photo Courtesy Patti Reznik Photography)

The College is meeting demand by adding an 84,000-sq-ft second building to its downtown Phoenix campus, located at Third and Fillmore streets next door to a building the school renovated two years ago.

Funded by the city of Phoenix with ASU as its tenant, the building’s budget was originally fixed at $20 million. “It was a long rectangular piece of land,” says Peter Berg, project manager with the Phoenix office of DPR Construction Inc., the project’s design-build contractor. “So the debate was, do we build a long, rectangular one-story building that would cover the whole site but would be poor density, or do we maximize the land?”

The city chose higher density to make the most of downtown’s dwindling real estate, but it had to add another $10 million to the budget. The final design from the Phoenix office of architect SmithGroup produced a five-story building only occupying half the site. The remaining space is preserved for future development and will be temporarily occupied by an easily removable parking lot, Berg says.

With Arizona being a top producer of copper ore in the U.S., copper was chosen in part because it is a large part of the state’s legacy. It is also highly recyclable and sustainable, and has intrinsic aesthetic appeal. (Photo Courtesy Sommer Caraway/SmithGroup)

“Certainly we could have made something smaller and simpler, but this is the corner of the campus and gateway to downtown for many people,” says Jeremy Legg, the city’s economic development program manager. “The building needed to welcome visitors to downtown and the ASU Phoenix campus.”

Programming started in September 2007, soon after the project was awarded. “At the time there weren’t funds to make this an all-ASU building,” says Mark Kranz, AIA, design principal with SmithGroup. “We were building a five-story building on a pro forma – how much can we build, and then how do you actually fit the program into that, and what do you have left over?”

Once schematics began in January 2008, the team had settled on a steel structure with concrete decks encased in a dramatic copper skin, housing classroom, office and administrative spaces; a 200-seat conference center; and a 60-seat computer lab. Since only the first three floors were funded by bonds for ASU use, the top two stories were finished to more generic office standards in order to be rented out.

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“In many ways this building’s top levels are like speculative office buildings where tenants move in and out,” Kranz say. “The level of flexibility from the very beginning was key. Things change daily/monthly/yearly with every company and every institution. In 10 years when this may need to change to another program entirely, the building infrastructure can’t get in the way of that.”

As fate would have it, it would take far less than 10 years for change to come due to state budget woes. “Because of the budget reductions that all the public universities had to take, the university reorganized, and my college got the departments of exercise, wellness, nutrition and health sciences,” says Dr. Bernadette Mazurek Melnyk, dean of the college. This added 34 full-time faculty and hundreds more students, which will be relocated to the downtown campus within the next two years and will eventually occupy all five levels of the new building.

After breaking ground on the building’s grade beam-and-caisson foundation in April 2008, DPR topped off the building’s steel structure in less than four months. “Steel was a driver because it is very fast to go up,” Berg says. “We took a risk early on when steel was still in great demand and it was hard to get a mill order. Without a formal contract, we actually committed to an order in December 2007. If we had been more formal and waited, the advantage of steel wouldn’t have been there and the project would be finishing in about four to six months from now.”

Design-assist subcontractors helped fast-track the delivery by meeting weekly for 3D building information modeling coordination. Modeling was used for just about everything: foundations, above-ceiling systems, even the city streets outside. “The city requested that we take the additional step of mapping the street to start a 3D database within the city,” Berg says.

The building’s signature 80,000-lb copper skin arose from the early involvement of Chandler-based subcontractors Kovach Inc. and KT Fabrication.

The installation of 80,000 lbs of copper skin ended up being the most complex part of the job. Careful planning and the use of a scale model helped mitigate any potential problems, which helped the team meet the fast-track delivery schedule. (Photo Courtesy Liam Frederick)

“You end up getting a lot more value by having the guys who are actually going to build it at the table during the design process,” Kranz says. “I’m not sure we could have gotten a copper skin for the price from the beginning.”

The subcontractors also helped simplify the number of panel types from up to 15 to just three.

The complexity of fabricating and installing the copper skin was mitigated through careful planning. At first the panels were fit together on paper and in computer models, but Berg says the team took the extra step of creating a 15-ft-tall model to which they assembled all the complex components of the real building’s skin.

The team is targeting LEED silver and is currently one point into gold, Legg says. Components include a solar water-heating system, construction waste management, demand-controlled ventilation and the copper itself, which is mostly recycled.

In addition, simple strategies such as having fewer window openings on the west side and maximum glazing to the north help to reduce energy costs for the life of the building. “Every façade looks different because of an engineered response to our desert environment,” Kranz says. “We like to think about how buildings should make sense from a passive standpoint, not just to get a certain certification on a point card.”

Student spaces have been cleverly incorporated where possible, from the dramatic multistory lobby that doubles as a break-out space for the conference center to unique ‘belly-up’ laptop bars in student lounges in the hallways outside of the classrooms. “The quality of the environment enhances learning,” Melnyk says. “It was well designed for student friendliness.”

Key Players

Owner: City of Phoenix
Tenant: Arizona State University
Architect: SmithGroup
General Contractor: DPR Construction, Inc.
Engineers: Paragon Structural Design, Inc.; Dibble Engineering
Landscape Architect: GBtwo
Subcontractors: Able Steel, Bel-Aire Mechanical, Kearney Electric, Western States Fire Protection

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