New South Road Parking Garage and Medical Office Building
South Road Parking Garage
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In November 2004, a major component of the Campus Modernization initiative was completed as the South Road Parking Garage opened to faculty, students and staff.
Construction progressed at an aggressive pace on the new 1,550-space parking garage, located in the area just south of the campus' Benedict Building. The central location and state-of-the-art design of the South Road Parking Garage will make parking and pedestrian access much more convenient for the thousands of employees, students, patients and visitors who enter the campus each year, providing sufficient on-campus parking for the first time since the 1970's!
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The garage's design/build process was selected as the fastest method for getting the new structure up and running: approximately 12 months from site approval to completion. Architectural firm
Desman Associates
, expert in designing parking garage projects for numerous health care facilities around the country, was selected to develop the garage’s interior structure;
Payette Associates
, the architectural firm which has designed the modernization of the hospital and school façade and window systems, is crafting the look of the garage’s exterior.
From multiple entrances and exits to an “open spandrel” design that makes for a lighter, brighter structure, the South Road Parking Garage was designed with user convenience and efficiency in mind. It features two off-setting entry ramps that will eventually hasten traffic flow by directing and separating patients and visitors from students and employees, providing, in essence, an “express lane” for each type of traffic. Bright lighting throughout will enhance vision and safety, while the command center for the Office of Public Safety has been relocated to the new garage’s first level.
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Other enhancements include pedestrian walkways throughout parking areas, which minimize the need for people to walk between parked cars, and glass-walled elevators.
With thousands of employees, hundreds of students, and hundreds of thousands of patient visits each year, traffic on this campus is on the scale of a small city: the South Road Parking Garage will make the campus much more “livable” for all of them.
Medical Office Building
The University of Massachusetts Medical School has received approval from the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Agency to build the foundation and external enclosure (what you'll hear referred to as the “core and shell”) for a medical office building on the west side of the new parking garage.
The building will provide needed office, school support and ambulatory clinical space. School and hospital administration will meet throughout the spring to identify the Medical School and UMass Memorial businesses and programs that will be housed in the five-story structure and make recommendations for an efficient layout of the facility.
Once this decision-making process is complete, the architectural design of the internal space for the medical office building will begin.
Construction of the shell and core is slated to begin in 2005. Planning and construction of the new building will not have an impact the opening of the new parking garage scheduled for this fall.