The Rush University Medical Center is the largest Perkins+Will healthcare project delivered to date using a BIM Platform. It is a 14-floor, $575-million, 806,000-square-foot building with three floors devoted to surgery, imaging, and specialty procedures. The upper floors contain 304 acute and intensive care beds, 72 neonatal intensive care unit beds, and 10 labor and delivery suites. Special considerations were made due to the complexity of the building, program requirements, and its scale to provide the team with the best possible working scenario. Early recognition of the interactive nature associated with successful BIM projects became the basis for planning. Our team of design professionals moved into a project site office to maximize the advantages of working in proximity with our extended team, construction managers, and client.
The site office, located at the medical center’s campus in Chicago, was equipped with the fastest and most robust desktop and network resources available at the time. Autodesk’s Revit Architecture became the core platform for production. Our consultant engineers complemented it with Autodesk Revit Structure and Autodesk Building Systems as the core production applications used by Thornton Tomasetti, Inc., and Environmental Systems Design, Inc., respectively (figure 2). Custom training courses on the Revit Architecture Platform were developed and delivered by "just-in-time" Perkins+Will IT Design Applications staff to ensure a streamlined educational experience focusing on instruction for project-specific needs and requirements. Multiple software tools were introduced to aid in the process of multiple design iterations, clash/collision avoidance, visualization, analysis, coordination, project information management, as well as team communication internally and externally to the project office. Some of the most frequently used applications in our portfolio are Navisworks, 3-D Studio Max, Ecotect, and Newforma. The Rush University Medical Center was among the first to use instant message-type communication as a means for coordination.
