Ithacating in Cornell Heights

Construction on the Gannett Health Center addition officially launched March 30th, and now that a couple of months have passed, visitors can see some real progress has been made at the site. The photos below were taken last Saturday.

Perhaps the most obvious visual impact is the plywood in the old window spaces, presumably for protection of occupants while work goes on only a few feet away.  The large machine against the southwest wall of Gannett is a pile driver, inserting poles into the soil to provide foundation support for the new building. More specifically, the poles are H piles, also known as bearing piles, which you can in the last photo on the left. The large metal tubes in the last photo are caisson pipes that will be socketed to the bedrock and filled with concrete. These are numbered and are going to be inserted right next to the existing building, according to the construction workers I spoke with at the gate. Feel free to ask the workers questions if they don’t have their hands full, most are more than happy to talk about their work.

Although the photo of the hole itself seems to have been accidentally deleted, the excavator on the west side of the site is being used to dig out a rather large, deep hole where further foundation work/pile driving will take place.

Construction at Gannett will be broken into phases – Phase I focuses on new construction, Phase II on renovation of the current building, and Phase III concludes the project with reconstruction of the Ho Plaza entrance. Phase I is expected to be complete by July 2016, and Phase II by August 2017. The whole project is expected to be complete by October 2017.

The building design is by local architecture firm Chiang O’Brien, with landscaping by Trowbridge Wolf Michaels Landscape Architects. There will be two additions to Gannett, a four-story, 55,000 square-foot building (which will use the H-piles seen below), and an additional 18,600 square foot addition that replaces the northeast side of the current building. The project also includes a new entrance and substantial renovations to the original 1950s structure (22,400 square feet of the existing 35,000), as well as landscaping, site amenities, and utilities improvements. The projected cost is $55 million.

The Gannett Health Center expansion has been a long time coming. Initial plans in the late 2000s called for a completely new building on site. HOLT Architects prepared a plan for a 119,000 square foot building, and an all-new building was also included in Cornell’s 2008 Master Plan. But once the Great Recession waged its battle on Cornell’s finances, the Gannett redevelopment was scaled back to its current form. According to a statement given by Gannett Director Dr. Janet Corson-Rikert to the Sun, the earlier plan had a budget of $133 million; the new addition and renovations are expected to cost $55 million.

The project is expected to create about 175 construction jobs and 40 permanent jobs (additional doctors, counselors and support personnel) when completed. Gannett currently employs 227, up from just 104 in 1996.