Banner Gateway Tower Expansion Doubles Size of Medical Center Campus

The $243-million, five-story Banner Gateway Medical Center tower expansion project, located in Gilbert, Arizona, is complete. The expansion doubles the size of the medical center campus and is expected to add more than 600 new jobs to the campus. McCarthy Building Companies served as the general contractor on the project.

The 351,000-square-foot addition includes an expanded women and infant services unit with NICU, added space for inpatient cancer care by Banner MD Anderson Cancer Center (located on the same campus) and more space for surgical, emergency, endoscopy and imaging services, including four new operating rooms, new MRI, as well as angiogram and endoscopy suites. Additionally, the tower expansion increases inpatient beds from 177 to 286 with additional shell space to accommodate future growth, and the relocation of the helipad to the new tower’s rooftop.

The women and infant services unit addresses the need for enhanced women and infant care, including labor, delivery and postpartum. This includes a new neonatal intensive care unit for babies that need extra care. Banner Gateway outgrew its previous eight-bed NICU, and added 16 larger rooms, a family lounge and lots of windows for natural lighting. Banner also added five labor and delivery rooms and nine postpartum rooms. Two new surface parking lots were also constructed, adding 492 new parking spaces for visitor and staff use.

The project was managed using a modified Integrated Project Delivery with the owner, design team, general contractor and trade partners all co-locating in a virtual “big room,” allowing for the project’s design and construction strategies to be developed and enhanced through a robust system of collaboration, solution innovations and coordination strategies being brought to the project to ensure operational excellence and end-user efficiency.

Some of the cost- and time-saving measures on the Banner Gateway project included:

• Project delivery completed in five separate design packages, allowing construction to start prior to design-phase completing
• Prefabrication of construction elements including exterior skin, bathroom pods, headwalls and mechanical and plumbing components
• Construction of building expansions on three sides of the hospital that occurred simultaneously

As part of the IPD process, all the major building trade partners were contracted early in design to aid in target value design, constructability and Building Information Modeling coordination prior to permit.
The architect on the project was SmithGroup, with civil engineering led by Dibble Engineering and structural engineering led by PK Associates. Field Verified served as an exterior skin consultant. Major trade partners included AmFab Steel, MKB, AROK, Buesing Excavation, Delta Electric, Foothills Fire, KT Fab, Otis Elevators, Stafford Crane, SwissLog, TD Industries and Walters & Wolf.

Construction on the tower expansion began in February 2021 and some campus renovation work will continue into 2024.