Presentation:  UCSF Helen Diller Hospital:  A Hospital of the Future on a Site from the Past

The new UCSF Helen Diller Hospital has been recognized as one of the nation's most innovative hospitals under construction. The nearly one million square foot project consists of a new fifteen story steel hospital tower located on a small highly constrained site bounded by roads, existing hospital buildings, and a labyrinth of existing and sometimes historic utilities. These constraints have produced a structure with unique and impressive geometry. The architecturally intensive design provided many structural challenges including a very irregular building shape, individually unique floorplans at each level, extensive cantilevers around the perimeter of the building, and a massive green roof.

The project team developed a novel lateral force resisting system that uses SidePlate moment connections, fluid viscous dampers, and custom cast steel nodes to connect the dampers to the moment frames, sometimes directly to the SidePlate connections themselves. A detailed nonlinear model was used to predict the nonlinear performance of structure, including explicit soil-structure interaction to accurately represent notably varying soil characteristics within the site. This presentation will focus on the unique challenges of designing a tall, irregular, hospital in a high seismic zone subject to OSHPD review. It will highlight the performance-based design tools that were used to facilitate the design and the preliminary studies that were performed to validate the increased seismic performance that viscous dampers would provide.

Guest Speakers:

Anthony Giammona, S.E.
Vice President, Nabih Youssef Associates
Anthony is a technical leader and Vice President at NYA and has worked on several of NYA's most technically challenging projects. He is a leader in the field of advanced technologies, such as base isolation, fluid viscous dampers, and performance based seismic design, and has authored several publications on the subject.

Daniel Tunick, S.E.
Project Manager, Nabih Youssef Associates
Daniel Tunick is a Project Manager at NYA with extensive experience in advanced seismic analysis and non-prescriptive design approaches. He has been involved in the design or peer review of over 25 Performance-Based Design projects in high seismic regions along the US West Coast, and has co-authored publications on the use of thin steel plate shear wall lateral systems.