Humber River Regional Hospital is located on an infill site directly across from the Ontario Ministry of Transportation headquarters on Keele Street in Toronto. The approximately 200m-long complex is comprised of a 15-storey tower and two, six-storey podiums.
The hospital, which spans 1.6 million square feet, features an innovative concrete pour structure without a construction joint. The engineers and builders have enforced a way of temporary contraction joints that will be left in the floor structure allowing shrinkage of the concrete to occur over several months. Once the process is complete, these joints will be connected to complete the floor diaphragm.
The project designers also separated the podium into nine slab areas and the tower into three slab areas. The design implements usage of two different foundations systems — a raft slab for the tower and 5,500-mm-wide strip footings for the podiums. The raft slab was used as the bedrock underlying the tower is more than 30 metres below the basement elevation. The wide-strip footings support six-storeys as compared to the tower which is 15-storey tall and is much heavier.
PCL Constructors Canada Inc., is engaged in three massive concrete pours of approximately 4,000 cubic metres each to build the 180-metre-long, 40 metre-wide and 1.8-metre-deep raft slab under the tower footprint. About 30% recycled cement has been used in the concrete structure. Besides the concrete tower, the hospital also employs a number of other design and construction features which distinguishes it from other similar large-scale projects.
Construction work started in the fall of 2011 and will be finished by 2015.
