Boldt sets the table at St. Luke's

The Central Operations office of The Boldt Company drilled 14 holes through seven stories of parking structure and kept going 100 feet into the ground to bedrock.

The construction team slid steel casings into the holes and stuffed them with thousands of cubic yards of concrete. Boldt kept going, drilling 19 more holes around the outside of the parking structure and creating similar caissons at each spot.

Those were the legs for St. Luke's Medical Center's Cardiology Center and Patient Tower, a 425,000-square-foot vertical expansion on the Milwaukee campus.

It wasn't easy. Nick Stromer, vice president of health-care projects for Boldt, said the 20-year-old parking structure had to support the drilling rig on the top floor and withstand the pounding of a drill piercing it from top to bottom.

"In the plans, we knew we could do this, but we were not quite sure of the finished result with the parking structure," he said. "All indications are the construction had minimal effect on the parking structure."

Next, Boldt built five structural towers around the perimeter of the parking structure up to what would be the eighth or ninth floor of the 12-story tower. Then it started adding structural steel and eventually moved on to the 30-foot-high, 125-foot-long trusses that run over a portion of the top of the parking structure.

"Basically, we created a tabletop with legs," Stromer said.

And on top of the table is the heart of the heart center. The tower runs seven stories above the parking structure and boasts a mechanical level, pharmacy, clinical services, operating rooms, intensive care, patient rooms, medical-surgical rooms and, at the top, bone marrow and oncology departments.

Boldt is nearing the end of the four-year project, and even though Stromer is a veteran of hospital projects, he said the St. Luke's addition has been a new experience.

"I've worked on vertical expansions to existing hospitals, but this was the first over an existing, living, breathing parking structure," he said. "I give credit to the project team. All the individual effort that went into this resulted in the success of this project."

- Chris Thompson