Fuller Group’s roots began in Denver, CO, where founder Bill Fuller began his career working for a firm that specialized in providing structural design services for hospital construction. Today, there is a team of professionals at Fuller with the experience and expertise needed to continue to meet the health care industry’s structural design needs. In addition, Fuller now offers building envelope services to the healthcare industry to not only ensure that the hospitals and other facilities are safe, but to also ensure they are enduring. Our health care experience includes critical care facilities, patient bed additions, VA hospitals, medical office buildings, and other infrastructure support.
Prisma Health/Clemson School of Nursing
South Carolina is projected to have a shortage of over 10,000 registered nurses by 2030. This 78,000-square-feet building is a collaborative effort between Prisma Health and the Clemson University School of Nursing created with the goal of meeting this massive need.
Fuller Group designed the superstructure as a concrete moment frame system with a one-way wide module (skip) joist concrete floor system. The facility design included several structural challenges. An auditorium on the ground level required the floor slab above to be supported with post-tensioned clear span girders. The connecting link between the Nursing School and the nearby School of Medicine was designed to support two stories of classrooms and collaborative space over an existing access road. Finally, due to the presence of fill on the site, Fuller Group designed the building to be supported on deep foundations using auger-cast piles drilled 40 feet below ground.
Bluffton Oncology
This 40,000-square-feet facility is located in Bluffton, SC and consists of a two story medical office complex including infusion services and a linear accelerator. The unique building geometry presented several challenges with respect to structural framing. Additionally, extreme environmental design criteria (high wind and seismic) made this design challenging, but also rewarding. The foundation system consisted of conventional shallow foundations supported by ground improvement made up of rammed aggregate piers. Intense coordination during the early stages of the project using a modified Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) design methodology resulted in a collaborative effort with minimal construction phase surprises.
Bon Secours St. Francis Millennium Cancer Center
This 65,000-square-feet building is the first freestanding outpatient cancer center for St. Francis, providing outpatient services for radiation treatments, medical oncology, and infusion. The building also includes a pharmacy, café, classrooms, research department, chapel, and library. The facility opened to patients in 2014 and has won local and state awards for its architecture, which is designed in the International Style. One of the unique challenges for the design of this building was the second floor, which was rotated five degrees in plan from the first floor, requiring additional coordination between the architect and engineer. Due to the large amount of exterior glass, Fuller Group selected to utilize moment frames to resist the lateral forces caused by wind or earthquakes. The building analysis was performed utilizing RAM 3D finite element software. The structure was then modeled in Revit for coordination with the other disciplines and for construction document creation.
St. Joseph’s Emergency Department
This project involved a single-story addition to an existing emergency department in Savannah, GA. The 17,770-square-foot addition was designed to support future vertical expansion for an upcoming ICU on the upper level. Fuller Group provided structural design for the emergency department structure, as well as the two-story volume atrium servicing the emergency department and the renovated outpatient surgery areas. Site structures in Fuller’s scope included the drive-through canopies, the ambulance canopy, and a new helipad. The expansion includes a composite concrete slab supported by conventional steel framing and an auger-cast grout pile deep foundation system. Original hospital construction consisted of concrete frames and therefore required isolation of the new steel system from the existing structure. The atrium is the signature architectural feature and includes a two-story volume with an arc along the south wall. This structure was challenging in terms of designing moment frames required to resist the large wind and seismic forces possible for this site and building occupancy. We designed built-up columns to provide the structure of the moment frames.