Construction and Manufacturing Come Together for Penn Pavilion Project

The Penn Medicine Pavilion project, being built by LF Driscoll and Balfour Beatty US, looks unlike many of the other construction sites in the city. For one, much of the workforce is off-site: the bathrooms are being built as pods, manufactured by Philadelphia D&M. The job site now is less congested, with fewer supplies and people around. This has increased safety overall, and helped improve scheduling and cost certainty.

From Strxur by Bluebeam:

The construction of the Pavilion is complex—it’s an urban site with nearly 1,000 workers. To save space, improve safety and speed up the building schedule, Balfour Beatty [and LF Driscoll] wanted to move as many functions as possible into modular processes, offsite. Bathrooms were a great candidate: modular bathrooms are already very much a thing; bathrooms are labor intensive and require the services of a variety of trades; they’re usually, especially in the case of a hotel or hospital, very similar and they’re numerous.

For the Pavilion, the JV team was involved during the conceptual design phase, and helped standardize the bathroom layouts. The result was repeatable, easily manufacturable units. Building the bathrooms themselves helped Balfour Beatty [and LF Driscoll] keep labor local, meet exacting specs and produce the pods at a facility nearby. They were able to do the bulk of their QA/QC there, instead of once they arrived at the building site. That means, if any issues were detected, there was no time wasted shipping the unit back to the factory, or having to perform repair work on a crowded site with weather conditions.

Other GBCA members working on the project include the following: