The Camino Medical Group building in Mountain View, California, was a three-storey medical office building of about 250,000 square feet with a parking structure, built for an affiliate of Sutter Health in the mid-2000s. It is one of the best-documented early projects in which design-assist trades modelled their own systems and coordinated them in 3D before fabrication, alongside lean construction methods. The owner's main goal was a shorter overall schedule.
At a glance
| Project | Camino Medical Group medical office building, Mountain View, California, USA |
| Owner | Sutter Health (Camino Medical Group affiliate) |
| Size | About 250,000 sq ft, three storeys, plus parking |
| Cost | Reported at roughly US$97–98 million |
| Approach | BIM-based coordination with design-assist trades, lean methods, open-book cost |
| Documented in | An ITcon research paper on MEP coordination; an AISC Modern Steel Construction article (2007) |
What was done
- Trades in early: mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire protection subcontractors joined during design and modelled their systems.
- Coordination in the model: the trade models were coordinated together, in regular sessions, before fabrication, so conflicts were solved on screen.
- Fabrication from the models: coordinated trade models were used for prefabrication.
- Lean methods: the team used lean planning and production methods to keep work flowing.
What it shows
Camino is often used to show what changes when the people who build also model: coordination becomes design work done together, and the fabrication model is the coordinated model. It is an early example of the habits later formalised in IPD.
Often misquoted
- "It was an IPD contract." Accounts describe a design-assist, BIM-integrated project with lean methods; several later Sutter Health projects were run as full IPD.
- Exact savings. Figures vary between sources; read the original papers before quoting numbers.
Where to read more
The ITcon paper on the project's MEP coordination (Khanzode, Fischer and Reed, 2008); the AISC Modern Steel Construction article "Virtual success" (November 2007).