Best of 2005 Awards

Buffalo Life Sciences Complex

Project of the Year: Research Facility

Building a facility for both research and academic purposes in the new Buffalo Life Sciences Complex - and meeting the needs of two sophisticated tenants and the demands of the project's developer, the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York - were accomplishments worthy of recognition, according to the Best of 2005 jury.

"They each have separate wet labs, separate dry labs, so it's a very complex project," one juror said.

"I thought it was a terrific building," another judge added.

The $91 million project, slated for completion this month, entails construction of a two-wing, 290,000-sq.-ft. complex on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus at Ellicott and Virginia streets in Buffalo. It houses the State University at Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute.

Roswell Park's side of the building has five stories as well as a two-story mechanical penthouse. Its 125,000 sq. ft. of space houses research facilities for genetics, pharmacology, and therapeutics programs. About 85 percent of the facility is set aside for "wet laboratories" that facilitate biological and genetic research, and the remaining 15 percent is for offices, conference rooms, and mechanical space.

The Buffalo Center's portion has four floors, also with a two-story mechanical penthouse. It has 130,000 sq. ft. of space used for supercomputing, commercialization of products, drug design, workforce development, and three-dimensional visualization facilities.

Both wings share about 35,000 sq. ft. in common areas and building support services.

The project team, led by Turner Construction of New York, fast-tracked four early bid packages - for sitework, foundation concrete, underground plumbing, and structural steel - in order to meet an aggressive time schedule for completion. The fast-tracking allowed completion of mass excavation and concrete work even before the structural steel arrived on site.

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Meanwhile, the team bid the steel early in the project, allowing the fabricator to place its mill order and receive raw materials prior to last year's sharp rise in steel prices.

But the team still faced hurdles to fabricate and ship the steel to the site, partly because of the building's irregular shape, which complicated the detailing process and resulted in a three-month delay in steel delivery. The team managed around the delay by rescheduling other work, such as curtain-wall fabrication and masonry.

The team also had to get five custom-built air-handling units, fabricated in Springfield, Mo., onto the roof. Each unit weighs 350,000 lb. and was shipped in 10 sections. The team had to assemble and disassemble a special crane several times onsite to hoist the units into place. Afterwards, the crews moved each piece into its final position and welded them together.

The building has a spread footing and grade-beam foundation, a structural steel frame, concrete slab on grade, and concrete slab on metal deck for the floors. It has the capacity to support four additional floors on top of the existing roof in a future expansion.

The complex's exterior is a combination of brick with slate accents, clear structural glazing, skylights, zinc metal panels at the mechanical penthouses, and curtain wall with custom-configured metal panels and integral glazing. The curtain-wall contractor fabricated and preglazed the metal wall system - consisting of one-story-high by half-bay-wide panels - offsite as part of the project team's overall effort to make up time from the steel delivery delays.

The complex is striving to earn "certified" status under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design program. It also logged 18.25 percent participation by minority-owned business enterprises and 6.87 percent participation by businesses owned by women, in both cases exceeding project goals.

The new complex connects to the Hauptman-Woodward Center for Structural Biology, which is already on the campus, via a pedestrian walkway that spans Ellicott Street.

Key Players

Owner: Dormitory Authority of the State of New York

Construction Manager: Turner Construction

Architect: Francis Cauffman Foley Hoffmann Architects

M-E-P Engineer: Bard, Rao + Athanas Consulting Engineers

Structural Engineer: Leslie E. Robertson Associates

Site-Civil Engineer: Watts Engineers

Excavation-Site: Pinto Heavy Construction Services

Foundation and Concrete: LPCiminelli

Structural Steel: Cives Steel

Flooring: Rochester Flooring Resource

Drywall-FP: Mader Construction

Roofing: All Weather Roofing

Concrete: Manning Squires Hennig

Plumbing-HVAC: John W. Danforth Co.

Electrical: Ferguson Electric

Erector: Contour Steel