CREJ - Journal

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MARCH 2015 \ BUILDING DIALOGUE \ 81
A Rubik’s Cube
of complex design
and engineering
feats packages
big building in
small site for
DIA’s new
Westin Hotel
and Transit
Center
S aint Joseph Hospital has been a
Denver fixture since Colorado’s
territorial days.
Its original 1873 iteration was
downtown, and the hospital
moved to its present site in the
Uptown neighborhood a few years later.
The facility saw the first brass sterilizer
west of the Mississippi River and X-ray
machines just a few years after their in-
vention.
But times change, and SCL Health ac-
quired the campus and began writing
the next chapter of the hospital in 2011
with Mortenson as the general contrac-
tor. Groundbreaking for the new con-
struction took place in December 2011.
“That’s when we started the enabling
work phase,” said Bill Gregor, director of
operations at Mortenson Construction.
That included demolition of some of the
buildings and realigning Downing Street
to the original grid to “create the super-
block the hospital sits on.” Downing had
been rerouted to accommodate an ex-
pansion for the since departed Children’s
Hospital, which occupied the site from
1917 to 2008.
Nearly everything has changed. “The
WORDS: Eric Peterson
‘A Building
for the next
100 years’