Houston, Texas, April 29, 2008 – Delivery of the new Memorial Hermann Memorial City hospital at I-10 and Gessner Road may signal a trend in both how healthcare projects are developed – combining healthcare services with professional office space – and how those facilities are built.

In an unusual programming combination, the new Memorial City tower rising 28 floors to the building’s distinctive ‘crown’ will provide both specialized healthcare facilities for women on floors 1-12, and mixed use business occupancy space, including doctor’s offices and relocation of Memorial Hermann’s corporate offices. The medical interiors and the hospital’s infrastructure were awarded to Houston-based general contractor SpawMaxwell. The award represents a growing niche for the company that is relatively uncommon in the industry: Collaboration on site between an interior and base building general contractor simultaneously.

Not only is this unique, collaborative project on schedule, it is also safe: SpawMaxwell is running over 270 men daily on site with more than 230,000 man hours logged without a recordable safety incident.

There are inherent conflicts in splitting packages between base and interior contractors: safety; logistics and staging; communication; and schedule. However, a specialty interiors team with a collaborative on-site approach can mitigate these potential issues, and have a tremendous impact on quality, cost, and schedule – especially in delivery of complex interior systems and building infrastructure. “When you control the whole building envelope, typically you control your own destiny,” said SpawMaxwell Project Manager Cory Burkhalter. “We’ve developed a niche and a reputation for effective on-site collaboration with base building general contractors primarily due to our expertise in (medical) interiors. Our ability to co-exist effectively on-site with another general contractor is huge.”

The SpawMaxwell scope includes 270,000 square feet of specialized facilities tailored to women and newborns: Labor & delivery; post partum; neonatal intensive care unit (NICU); nursery; OB-GYN; general medical surgery; recovery; pediatrics; and the fast track delivery (SpawMaxwell is cutting delivery time by two months) of the 25,000SF in-vitro fertilization lab. The company is also responsible for a dedicated 18,000SF central plant for the hospital, which includes three cooling towers, with 3,000 tons of capacity, and a 15,000 gallon diesel fuel tank to power two generators. The interiors package also includes installation of a private telephone network (PBX); and enunciator panels for critical communication systems including nurse’s call station, fire alarm, generator, and med gas alarms, which will be back fed to the existing east tower in order to monitor its critical systems.

The combined project is on schedule to reach substantial completion simultaneously – base and interiors – on November 30, 2008, which is remarkable considering the rigorous medical inspection requirements (some procedures require up to 72 hours advance notice), and complex commissioning of vital systems that require extraordinary planning, communication, and close collaboration.