O’FALLON, ILL. — Clayco Inc. and its joint-venture partner Legacy Building Group have been selected to construct a $30 million data center and medical office building on the Progress West HealthCare Center campus in O’Fallon. Clayco will oversee both projects, which are being completed on behalf of BJC HealthCare. Legacy Building Group will manage construction of the 60,000-square-foot medical office structure, and Clayco will manage the data center project.
“Our approach with Legacy Building Group speaks to the overall mentality not only of BJC but also of Clayco,” explains Kirk Warden, Senior Vice President and Partner at Clayco. “We want to be inclusive in the diversification of subcontractors, and this kind of opportunity allows them not only to do a job for a fairly substantial client, but also it is a fairly important project, and probably beyond the size of something they could do on their own.”
Like many healthcare facilities across the country, BJC initiated its project in response to a growing population and technological changes in the industry. While the medical office building is being constructed as part of a larger plan to bring more primary care and specialty physicians to the bustling St. Louis suburb, the data center will replace an outdated system that is currently housed in the Clayton Avenue Building on the Washington University Medical Center campus.
The 40,000-square-foot data center will be equipped to accommodate both the present and future needs of BJC Healthcare. Although completion of the facility is slated for early 2010, the entire transition from the company’s existing data center is likely to take several years, with 100 to 120 older servers being replaced each year. Without compromising the aesthetics of the campus, the center is being designed to withstand essentially any kind of natural disaster that could occur, according to Warden.
Additionally, “BJC was very interested in sustainability, so the data center itself will be a USGBC LEED-Certified facility,” Warden says. “Clayco’s culture typically tries to advocate and promote all designs of its buildings to be [LEED] certifiable, so I think the medical office building will also end up being LEED certified.”
Although the elements of sustainable design have not been finalized, plans for the two-story medical office building call for the facility to be connected to the existing hospital. The addition will enable Progress West to expand its current operations to include new services such as a cardiac catheterization lab.
Construction of the two buildings is scheduled to begin in February, with completion slated for early 2010. Additional members of the project team include St. Louis-based Arcturis as architect; Pittsburgh-based CJL Engineering as the mechanical engineer; and e2 Energy & Environmental Solutions Inc. as the sustainability consultant.