Construction projects that target the very best in sustainable infrastructure, aesthetic design and dynamic project decision-making tend to opt for a collaborative contracting model. While progressive design-build contracting offers the flexibility to ensure success, how can a contractor provide the same advantages to a more budget-conscious client, whose core mission also includes the responsible stewardship of public funds?

The answer is on full display in Balfour Beatty’s work on the North Coastal Health and Human Services Agency (NCHHSA) building, a County of San Diego facility in Oceanside, California. Through the use of a stipulated sum, design-build contract, our team delivered a state-of-the-art, bright and beautiful building for the county that ensured the value of every spent dollar was fully maximized toward public health, all while exemplifying the very best in lean construction practices and achieving LEED® Platinum certification.

Perfect Partnership

To provide the County of San Diego with a successful NCHHSA building, our team first laid the most essential elements of groundwork – understanding and internalizing the county’s mission and engaging a design partner with extensive experience and a mutual mission of client-first solutions.

The county had a set budget, but within that target wanted a state-of-the-art building, net zero certification, standard-setting lean construction practices and, to top it all off, an aesthetic design that fit the community’s unique character. Our longstanding partnership with HMC Architects was the perfect fit and has resulted in success after success with projects like the J. Paul Leonard/Sutro Library, the MiraCosta College Health and Wellness HUB and countless other K-12 and higher education campuses.

“Working with HMC on the NCHHSA building was another opportunity to compound our industry-leading lean expertise,” says Senior Vice President Anton Greenville. “With a clear-eyed understanding of the county’s budget needs and a record of trust between Balfour Beatty and HMC, we could get to work immediately with phased design packages that allowed us as much schedule flexibility as possible.”

Getting involved as early as possible began paying off immediately with input from our Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) teams, who fully modeled the project in order to conduct 3D coordination, design clash detection and constructability reviews.

The latter step proved critical to the project’s sustainability goals, giving our team a precise projection of the total area needed for casting tilt-up structural walls in order to minimize the temporary casting slabs on which they would be created (another cost-saving measure identified early by our team and HMC partners).

Casting slabs are often destined for waste or recycling near the end of a project, so an accurate 3D model of the entire jobsite and the complex surface area and volumetric calculations the model enabled gave our project teams a reliable basis for several project considerations. Most notably, the team could virtually navigate the delicate balancing act of scrapped concrete versus the emissions and costs saved by using tilt-up concrete walls.

“We ultimately recycled our casting slabs, boosting the project’s sustainability and earning additional LEED® points toward our Platinum certification,” Anton adds. “Our team is immensely proud to have realized the county’s sustainability goals and built one of the first buildings in the state to achieve LEED® Platinum designation and net-zero status.”

To meet both the building design criteria and the parking requirements for this public facility, our team creatively worked around the tight project constraints by increasing the height of one wing of the building. The increase in usable vertical space also better enabled our team to build a section of underground parking, all within the building footprint. In the process of identifying this solution, the team was also able to reconfigure the design to accommodate a second elevator at the client’s request.

At every step, Anton and the Balfour Beatty team maintained an environment of constant communication and collaboration with the county, our HMC partners and trade partners to ensure design changes could be accommodated within the budget or absorbed elsewhere.

Of course, with a final appearance as stunning as the finished NCHHSA buildings, the nuts and bolts of sustainability and budget adherence weren’t the county’s only goals, and our teams still had more to deliver.

Full Sail Features

As a public health facility, the county also highly valued Balfour Beatty and HMC’s approach to the building’s aesthetic quality. Now in full operation a few years after completion, the building sees hundreds of visitors per day and an often fully occupied parking lot. San Diego County anticipated this, and thus wanted a bright, clean and beautiful facility with plenty of natural light and airflow.

Our team approached this aesthetic goal as an opportunity to further reduce the project’s carbon load, incorporating several design elements and construction solutions that are both sustainable and cost-effective.

To create an open and airy environment, the team first incorporated a white-painted exposed ceiling design throughout the entire facility. While this can be a trendy approach in modern office construction, it also presented an opportunity for substantial cost savings over a more traditional drop-in ceiling. Likewise, exposed and polished concrete flooring throughout created a sleek and clean environment while also saving money over virtually any other flooring material.

“Our team ensured that nearly every design element accomplished not just one goal, but often two or three,” Anton adds. “The design carries this space and creates a public health environment that encourages visitors and inspires confidence in the county’s health services.”

Perhaps most ambitiously included was the county’s requirement for natural airflow in the building’s two-story open lobby. Oceanside enjoys a temperate coastal climate, and taking advantage of the abundant fresh and cool air presented yet another opportunity to reduce electrical load to achieve net-zero emissions, tie the facility to its community’s character and create an inviting space. The first step was to incorporate stunning sail-shaped sunshades into the building’s exterior to prevent a greenhouse effect in the lobby, also a tie-in to the community’s coastal sailing culture. Still, a more dynamic (and pneumatic) solution was necessary for free-flowing air in the lobby.

Again, VDC coordination and extensive energy modeling of the building provided key preconstruction insights and the necessary virtual environments to anticipate airflow through the space, including considerations for typical wind direction and sunlight on the exterior façade.

The fully louvred windows built into the lobby walls ultimately ventilated air too well, so our team utilized the flexibility of the design-build process and cost savings generated by value engineering elsewhere on the project to provide a solution. After additional temperature and airflow studies of the now-actual building, the team added mechanized shutters to the louvres to provide airflow cutoff when exterior conditions swing to the extremes. The shutter devices are even incorporated into the facility’s Building Management System (BMS) for centralized control and ease of use.

“Under a design-build framework, even with a final stipulated sum and guaranteed price, our teams have the flexibility to take these unforeseen challenges in stride and ensure our client receives a final product that truly maximizes every goal,” Anton says. “We have the best preconstruction, design management, VDC and project teams in the business, and on design-build projects they’re unleashed to leverage every advantage toward quality assurance and project success.”

Partners in Public Trust

When building vital public facilities, from health services administration centers to public schools to emergency operations centers, Balfour Beatty understands that our clients take their public investiture seriously.

Our teams proudly take ownership of that responsibility. We come alongside the mission of public stewardship with industry-leading lean practices, tech-enabled construction solutions and a client-first approach to collaboration that ensures accelerated schedules, reliable budgets and successful projects that better our communities.