Three major construction projects at the medical center — the Clark center, the comprehensive cancer center and the underground parking garage — are proceeding on schedule and should all be complete by the year’s end.

Construction of Stanford’s new Center for Cancer Treatment and Prevention/Ambulatory Care Pavilion is about two-thirds finished, and the facility is expected to be complete by December, said project manager John Gaston. Once the building is finished, its occupants will have to wait 60 to 90 days before moving in, to allow enough time for testing and calibrating the center’s sophisticated equipment including a cyberknife, a PET/CT scanner and six linear accelerators.

The exterior of the four-story, 218,000-square-foot building is mostly in place, except for the glass and metal panels that are now being installed. All of the building’s exterior materials, including the roof, should be completely installed by June, Gaston said. Meanwhile, interior spaces are being built out, starting with the ground floor and working up. "When this project is done, you’ll see that the materials and finishes are first-rate, very high quality," Gaston predicted.

Nearing completion, the Clark Center is one of three major construction projects on the grounds of the medical center. The cancer center and a new underground parking structure will also be finished in 2003. Photo: Sara Selis

The James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, which will serve as the headquarters of the Bio-X program, is about 85 percent finished. Construction should be completed by the end of May, with the first occupants moving in by mid-June, according to project manager Maggie Burgett. The exterior framework and the roof are complete, although some of the balconies, which ring the building, are still being poured.

The Clark Center features an innovative design intended to foster interdisciplinary collaboration through shared spaces, easily adjustable lab layouts, large open labs uninterrupted by corridors, and an expansive courtyard in the middle of the facility. The 245,000- square-foot building — a huge limestone-and-steel curved structure with a hollow core (the courtyard) — features three wings, three floors and a partial basement. The 146,000 square feet of interior space includes labs, a café and teaching space. Unlike most research facilities, the Clark Center has support spaces on the perimeter of the building, with labs and offices on the inside.

"We had a group of architects tour the project recently, and they said they’d never seen anything like it," Burgett said. "The building is designed to bring people together. We think of the labs as neighborhoods rather than distinct labs."

The underground parking garage in front of Stanford Hospital, known as PS-4, will provide 1,030 parking spaces, all for physicians and staff. The garage, which encompasses 8 acres on four underground levels, is expected to open by mid-April,

but physicians and staff won’t be able to park there until sometime in June. That’s because once the garage opens, patient parking will be temporarily relocated from PS-3 to PS-4, to allow for some modest renovations to PS-3.

The garage is designed to be unobtrusive, with landscaped beds and trees covering its surface, allowing a park-like setting just outside the main entrance to Stanford Hospital. An above-ground pavilion, which is nearly complete, houses the elevators, stairwells, emergency generators and transformers.