The Susan and Fayez Sarofim Pavilion project adds more than one million square feet of state-of-the-art spaces for surgery, emergency care, intensive care, and administrative and support services. In addition to replacing 71 existing patient beds, the project added 186 new beds, 24 operating rooms, and 15 emergency room bays. The new building includes a four-space rooftop helipad for Houston’s only hospital-based air medical service.

IMEG was challenged with vertically expanding this facility over an active existing two-story building. The original building was designed to expand to a total building height of 15 stories, however, with IMEG’s expertise and collaboration with all parties on sequencing, the building was increased to a total of 18 stories. The additional floors allow Memorial Hermann to capture critical programming space on the tight urban campus. The foundations had sufficient capacity for the additional floors of the vertical expansion, but the building columns and the lateral force resisting required strengthening. IMEG structural engineers worked through various sequencing scenarios and developed detailed plans to allow the contractors to minimize disruption and costs to the project.

The expansion also included a 900-stall parking garage, built adjacent to several existing buildings. This structure has been designed to accept up to 11 floors of vertical expansion to house hospital functions.

IMEG provided due diligence for Phase 2 (design-bid-build), which included approximately 42-aces of site work, renovation, and decommissioning of several OSHPD buildings. Existing campus utilities were re-routed and either buried or placed adjacent to the Phase 1 area. Utility re-routing was completed while maintaining continuity of services for the rest of the campus.