Eskenazi Health Ambulatory Care Unit (ACU)

American Structurepoint was the structural engineer for this six-story structure that serves as the "front door" to a completely new building campus for Wishard Hospital. The design features a striking extended front façade and canopy that makes it a welcoming entrance point for the hospital complex. The building structure is framed with composite structural steel for strength and economy. The roof was designed to make LEED options available including a vegetated multi-purpose "green" roof. Building information modeling (BIM) software was utilized throughout design to allow coordination between the many consultants on this many-faceted, multi-building project. Utilization of BIM enabled better understanding of the interplay of elements within the Ambulatory Clinic itself, as well as its connectivity with adjacent healthcare buildings, including the main hospital tower, parking garage, and medical office building.

This project was geared from the very beginning as a “true BIM” project, meaning all structural, mechanical, and architectural consultants were required to use a BIM platform to coordinate, transfer, and produce information for construction documents, shop drawing preparation, and construction sequencing. Early on, the architects provided our engineering group with a schematic Revit Architecture file that the Structural Group used to develop our Revit Structure models and structural analytical model used to design the individual elements. The advantage of importing the architect’s Revit model into the structural model is that it allows the structural engineer to model the virtual structure while maintaining coordination with the architect’s predefined 3-D geometry. This geometry can then be monitored by the program to look for changes made by any designer and alert the user as the design progresses.