When the sunset glow suffuses the horizon, figures begin to scatter along the city's roads. In this bustling city stands a tall building quietly, its upper glass curtain wall glistening in the sunlight, while the brown tones of its lower section add a touch of warmth to the structure. The overall effect presents a plain yet warm palette that coexists harmoniously with the surrounding natural landscape. Such a design not only creates a dialogue across time and space with the neighboring outstanding historic buildings, but also visually constructs a continuous and richly layered urban landscape. This is the Shanghai Ruijin Hospital Gastrointestinal Tumor Clinical Diagnosis and Treatment Center, constructed by Shanghai Electric Power Construction.

Founded in 1907, Ruijin Hospital is a large Grade 3A general teaching hospital with a century of heritage. This project is located within the grounds of Ruijin Hospital and features multidisciplinary team (MDT) and one-stop diagnosis and treatment services. It integrates clinical care, technological innovation, and teaching and training into a single entity, creating a globally influential clinical medical innovation center and an integrated diagnosis and treatment center aligned with the precision medicine characteristics of individualized treatment for solid tumors, bringing convenience to the general public.

Making a Dojo Inside a Snail Shell: Daring to Shoulder Responsibility Without Fear of Hardship

The Ruijin Hospital Gastrointestinal Tumor Clinical Diagnosis and Treatment Center project is located in downtown Shanghai, close to surrounding residential buildings. Shanghai Electric Power Construction was mainly responsible for the fabrication and installation of the steel structures for multiple individual buildings, including the main diagnosis and treatment center building, the podium building, and the connecting corridors. The total floor area is 60,000 square meters, the building height is 99.8 meters, and the total steel structure volume is approximately 8,000 tons. "Building a livelihood project in such a cramped space, the local Shanghai residents jokingly call us 'making a dojo inside a snail shell,'" said project manager Liu Ming with a chuckle. "As soon as the project started, we faced a working environment with strict management, limited space, and difficult transportation, which brought considerable 'resistance' to our engineering work."

Because the project is located next to residential buildings, construction work inevitably caused inconvenience to local residents. How to smoothly advance the project while ensuring residents' normal lives became an urgent priority. To solve this problem, the project team actively communicated closely with the local neighborhood committee to find a way forward. Through continuous communication and coordination, construction measures were formulated according to local conditions, effectively easing residents' resistance and successfully turning 'NIMBY' into neighborly harmony. To address the constraints of the limited site, the project team quickly assembled a professional team and repeatedly verified the adaptability of vehicle turning radii, the load-bearing capacity of the basement roof, and the lifting efficiency within the tower crane's operating coverage. They proposed using 13-meter transport vehicles entering from the west entrance and added a crane unloading plan, allowing steel structure work to begin one month ahead of schedule and ensuring a seamless transition between basement structure construction and superstructure construction.

The safety department conducts daily on-site inspections to identify and eliminate hazards the same day; the quality department inspects and accepts each floor upon completion, with all passing; and other departments cooperate closely. It is precisely because of this interlocking of processes and effective organization of labor that, despite major adjustments to the critical path that affected the schedule by seven months, we were able to hold the line on the 'back wall' deadline.

Innovative Technical Solutions, Striving for Quality Engineering

Centering on quality engineering, we set a benchmark for high-quality construction. Building high-quality projects is the eternal pursuit of electric power construction workers. The project team always places technical and quality work first, firmly ensuring that technology is the core and that technology leads the way to safeguard project construction and production. During the structural detailing process, we actively communicated with the design institute. At the same time, in coordination with construction, technical, and safety teams, we prepared more than 10 construction plans and technical measures in advance. These included changing the grouting of steel column tops to side grouting of steel columns, solving the problem that concrete grouting at the top of steel columns affected normal steel structure lifting and ensuring efficient lifting progress; and the '3 permanent wall ties + 2 temporary wall ties' plan, which avoided the situation where tower crane wall ties were affected by the strength of the main structure, making steel structure lifting impossible, and ensured zero impact on the schedule except for wall tie installation time.

Solid Details, Visible Engineering Quality. As the old saying goes, details determine success or failure, and quality is the foundation and soul of the construction industry. Only when standardized work is done well can the roots be strengthened and the soul be consolidated. In the early morning, bustling Shanghai is quiet and peaceful, yet lifting operations at the project team continue in an orderly manner. Because Ruijin Hospital is located in the city center, there are traffic restrictions during the day, so trucks can only enter at night. Also, because the storage yard is small, steel columns must be lifted immediately after arriving on site. The on-site construction crews operate a 'two-shift' system—lifting steel columns at night and steel beams during the day. To ensure the safety of nighttime lifting operations, project management personnel take turns on duty with the construction crews every night.

During the project construction process, for everyone, 'rising at sunrise and not resting at sunset' was commonplace. We monitored problems arising during construction throughout the process, and once a problem was solved, we immediately moved on to the next work face. Construction involves hundreds of processes before and after, and each process must achieve zero quality problems. The project has hundreds or even thousands of positions, and every construction worker never slacked off. From structural lifting, welding, floor deck laying, rebar tying, and concrete pouring to other engineering steps, every link was strictly executed according to standards and specifications, all presenting excellent visual quality for all to see.

Not Afraid to 'Meet Bare-Faced': Showing True Quality

Only with strength and true quality does one dare to appear 'bare-faced.' Quality is the hard power of a project. Only by demanding perfection in every detail with craftsmanship can we live up to a city's affection. The project is located in the city center, meaning that construction is almost openly displayed as it progresses, subject to 'zero-distance' scrutiny from the outside world. Every evening, many citizens stroll around the construction site and take the opportunity to 'supervise' the work. This place has become a local 'check-in spot,' where people discuss schedule progress and evaluate the construction situation.

"Everyone's attention and discussion are a spur to me—a spur to put in more effort and bring about the project's completion quickly and well." Under the scorching sun at 9 a.m., at a height of 90 meters, project team members said this while enduring the high temperature, writing responsibility and commitment with their labor and sweat.

"If one can use the strength of all, one will be invincible in the world; if one can use the wisdom of all, one will have no fear of the sages." Through the all-out efforts of all project personnel, the steel structure work fully reached ground level on April 15, 2023, with main structure construction progressing at 'one floor every six days.' In October of the same year, the 22-story structure was topped out, nearly one month ahead of the original plan. The project successively won the Shanghai Civilized Construction Site award and the 2023-2024 Shanghai Construction Project Metal Structure (Municipal Quality Project) Golden Steel Award.

"Tall buildings rise from the ground, and every brick and tile embodies craftsmanship." The joy of success is hard to express in words. Looking back on more than 600 days and nights of hard work, we forged ahead through wind and waves, advanced bravely through thorns and obstacles, and created achievements by overcoming difficulties. In the future, we will continue to turn diligence into a lamp for the journey ahead, advancing step by step, gathering grains of sand into a towering pagoda, clustering blossoms into splendor, and merging streams into rivers, writing the most beautiful chapter of pursuing dreams with responsibility and practical action!