Western Specialty Contractors Installs Green Roof on OSF HealthCare’s New Ministry Headquarters in Illinois

Western Specialty Contractors was part of the team that transformed a seven-story historic building in downtown Peoria, Illinois into OSF HealthCare’s new Ministry Headquarters.

Western replaced the building’s old roof with a low-maintenance roof garden system designed to alleviate stormwater runoff, extend the life of the roof and add aesthetic value.

Most recently owned by Caterpillar, the building along with the Peoria Professional Building and an adjacent parking lot were donated to OSF HealthCare in January 2018. The building had been slated for demolition and was in various stages of disrepair.

The building’s $150-million, four-year restoration, with two years occurring during the global pandemic, was completed in January 2021 and consolidates 500 OSF HealthCare employees sharing 275,000 square feet of historically restored space.

OSF HealthCare is an integrated health system owned and operated by The Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, Peoria, Illinois. OSF employs more than 24,000 Mission Partners in 147 locations, including 15 hospitals – 10 acute care, five critical access – with 2,097 licensed beds and two colleges of nursing throughout Illinois and Michigan.

The project’s general contractor CORE Construction hired Western’s Peoria branch to replace the building’s existing roof with a vegetative roof system and IPE wood patio pavers specified by Dewberry Architects.

Western started the project by removing the building’s existing modified roof and flashings down to the deck. During the roof’s removal, it was discovered that the cementitious topping on the existing terra cotta roof was crumbling and unusable. Western was instructed to remove all the topping on the 13,000-square-foot main roof and temp it to prevent water intrusion into the interior finishings nearing completion on the seven floors below.

To complete the roof project, Western installed cold applied waterproofing on the roof’s elevated sidewalk, followed by a pedestrian deck coating in the roof’s penthouse and carbon fiber on its interior beams.