When St. Jude Children's Research Hospital first opened their doors in 1962, the campus consisted of one star-shaped building on 82,000 square feet and 125 employees. When the construction is completed in 2005, the updated complex will comprise some two million acres, more than a dozen buildings and approximately 3,000 employees.

The St. Jude campus of today currently has eight buildings, but those facilities will not be enough to support the planned growth for both the clinical and research programs over the next five years. To accommodate the new strategic plan, St. Jude's has in place plans to more than double the size of its existing campus.

Patient care expansion involves the renovation of the Care Center, which will add approximately 10,000 square feet of space and many redesigned spaces.

A new office building will relieve cramped quarters for the hospital's fundraising branch, American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC).

On the former St. Joseph Hospital campus, which is now known as St. Jude North, a few buildings will be renovated to provide offices, outpatient clinics and support laboratories. Other older buildings will be demolished and new facilities built to meet specific St. Jude needs. St. Jude recently purchased the St. Joseph property after the hospital closed.

A short-stay housing facility is planned for patient families and out-of-town guests. Currently, patients and families who require short stays must be housed in Memphis hotels. This building will also offer some flexibility to be used by the many visiting scientists and ALSAC regional staff members who come to Memphis for training.

Existing buildings do not currently provide adequate space for large conferences, and as clinical and research efforts expand, so will the need for meeting rooms and training facilities. To meet these needs, St. Jude plans to build an education /conference center.

Proposed program expansions cannot be realized without construction of a new building to house the increased patient care, support and laboratory research activities. This integrated patient care and research building will contain about 500,000 square feet and should be completed by mid to late 2004.

In the last month, a campus wide planning package was awarded The Smith Group, which is the architect on the project. Beers Construction is providing all the construction management related activities such as scheduling, cost estimates and constructability review.

The new Integrated Research Center was completed earlier and provides 10 floors of additional research space.

All construction to the campus will be completed without the hospital missing a beat. Pedestrian and vehicle traffic as well as space restrictions are an everyday occurrence.

"It's a tight site and you have all that to contend with," said Tim York, senior project manager for Beers Construction. "But it's part of what we do. We're also part of the health care group so we do a lot of work around hospitals, so we deal with it all the time."

The lower five floors are interstitial distribution of utilities. The floor construction is the first time this type has been used. It's supported by hangars from the floor above and the actual floor is precast, aeriated, autoclave concrete. These are precast planks that resemble hollow core planks and are about 10 feet long and 2 feet wide.

"Part of the problem when you get into a campus like this, one where they didn't have planned growth for the first 20 or 30 years, some of the utilities tend to be kind of haphazard," said York. "We spent the first 13 weeks out here moving utilities getting ready to start construction."

The building sits on 931 auger cast piles that measure 20 inches in diameter and were drilled and pressure grouted.

There are two freestanding tower cranes on-site. One is a PECO 400 that is at 290 feet and the other, a 355, is at 330 feet. Mobile cranes are also brought in as needed. Morrow Equipment, based out of Salem, Oregon, leased the cranes for this project.

There are some 50-plus subcontractors on this project with an overall project cost of around $130 million.

Construction crews are currently working two shifts, making it close to a 24-hour-a-day operation. Between the two shifts there are approximately 450 workers on the site.

The weather, which usually plays a major factor in the construction process, was nearly a non-factor for this project to date.

This project is an extremely complicated structure, a concrete structure in a seismic zone. When you do research facilities you have to watch out for vibration and other seismic factors during the construction.

"There is 5,400 tons of reinforcing in this building," said York. "Which is a huge number for a building of this size."

This construction falls under the requirements of seismic acceleration 2.03 and also under high-rise construction. When the two of those combine, you get into secondary water sources for fire protection, all your mechanical, electrical and plumbing has to be seismically restrained and the approach to the structure with all the seismic columns and restraints become significantly different.

Hospital construction is currently a hot market all across the country and St. Jude is undergoing a massive campus-wide growth plan.

St. Jude will no longer be that small 125-employee hospital that opened its doors all those years ago. With every step of growth and expansion, more and more children will survive cancer and that's what counts when building for the future.