$600M Buckhead medical tower completes ascent, on track for 2020 debut

A curving, glassy, 16-story medical office tower in Buckhead has finished its construction climb and is on track to open next summer.

The $603 million project, which will house the Piedmont Heart Institute, broke ground in early 2017 and just completed its framing stage, officials said this week.

Its glassy blade design is visible from many points on the north side of town, despite its relatively meager height as new towers go.

UPDATE: A hospital rep sends this clarification regarding the building, which helps to explain its visibility from afar: “It’s 225 feet, which is built to the maximum allowed by city zoning rules for that particular neighborhood and that side of the street in Atlanta. And while 16 stories might not seem like a lot, hospital floors are considerably larger than residential floors. If it weren’t a hospital building, it would be more like 25 floors.”

Once the $450 million first phase of the tower project—led by developer CBRE and designed by architecture firm HKS—wraps in the summer of 2020, the lower 10 floors will feature 132 new hospital beds serving Piedmont Hospital’s Buckhead campus.

Piedmont Healthcare

Until 2022, the top six stories will remain vacant.

From 2022 through 2026, the upper floors will be built out, adding 276 additional beds—for a total of 408 beds and 10 operating rooms.

The former Sheffield Medical Building—and hundreds of trees—was felled to make way for the new tower

On Wednesday, development officials celebrated the new building’s topping out with donors who had contributed $100,000 or more to the project.

Inside the upcoming tower will be the new Marcus Heart and Cadiovascular Center and the Samsky Invasive Cardiovascular Services Center.

Officials noted the project remains on budget and ahead of schedule.