There’s an old joke about Midwestern weather. “There are two seasons: winter and construction.”
Of course, nowadays we see plenty of year-round construction work in colder climates. This past November, I paid a visit to the site of the Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Center for Advanced Care (CFAC) project, designed by Cannon Design and currently under construction on the Froedtert Hospital campus in Wauwatosa, Wisc. (technically fall, yes, but the twenty-something-degree temperature and accompanying strong wind made it feel more like January; luckily it wasn’t snowing). The new nine-story, 609,000-sq.-ft facility is part of the vast Milwaukee Regional Medical Center. Roughly five miles west of downtown Milwaukee, the 300-acre campus includes Froedtert Hospital, Ronald McDonald House, Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, Curative Rehabilitation, Medical College of Wisconsin and the BloodCenter of Wisconsin.
-- Excerpt by MSC senior editor Geoff Weisenberger from his article “On the Job (Site)” in the January 2015 issue of MSC (available now!). Click to the article to get a firsthand look inside the life of a typical day on site during the project’s steel erection phase.