XL Construction/RMW Design-Build Team Leans into Collaboration to Help UCSF Build Its 1st Mass Timber Project

OAKLAND, Calif. — It turned out to be the winning idea. When XL Construction and RMW submitted their design-build proposal to UCSF Health for the Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland ASB (Administrative Support Building) project, they decided to pitch a number of options for the structure. One of those options was to make the building out of mass timber.
UCSF Health not only loved the idea of making the structure mass timber, they also resonated with the team’s collaborative approach.

The XL/RMW team really showed UCSF Health that they had both the solutions and the systems to help us achieve our ambitious goals on this project,

says Michael McDonnell, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland Sr. Project Manager, Design & Construction.

After being selected for the project, the team got down to the hard work of making mass timber work for UCSF Health’s budget. “Part of the story of this job,” says XL Project Executive Terry Wong, “is that we started with a higher budget than what the client had budgeted for, but they had entrusted us with the process to successfully drive the cost down. So, the team goes into Join and begins making decisions.”

In addition to making the budget work, the team also had to grapple with other big challenges, which included:

• A complicated permitting process
• A shortened schedule
• The rising cost of mass timber
• Interior programming changes
• Prefabrication
• Exterior options

“The timing of how quickly the team could identify and vet options was critical to getting through the design cycle,” says XL Sr. Design Build Manager Corrie Messinger. That meant working closely with the Owner and the design team in the Join collaborative project delivery platform.

RMW hadn’t used Join before this project, says Principal Caitlin Pastori. She adds that at first her team relied on XL to put things into the platform, but once the team saw how it simplified decision-making, they were all in, literally. Says Pastori: “Join was the bridge between the designer brain, the contractor brain, and the owner brain.”

Learn more about the XL/RMW team’s path to budget by reading the case study here.

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