St. Jude Advanced Research Center II, Memphis

Filed permits put roughly $281.2 million against structure, core systems and mechanical infrastructure, and $43.8 million against the foundation package. Inside an $810 million total, that split tells you what kind of building this is.

St. Jude Advanced Research Center II is 865,000 square feet of laboratory, office and research support space in Memphis’ Pinch District, the largest and tallest building on the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital campus. At roughly 280 feet it ranks among the taller structures on the Memphis skyline. Sources put it at 16 to 17 stories; 130 lab spaces are distributed across 13 floors. Foundation and early-site work ran through 2025 under a separate permit, and St. Jude announced on February 20, 2026 that it was ready to start vertical construction.

Project Scope

The site is about 5.8 acres at A.W. Willis Avenue and Danny Thomas Boulevard, and three existing buildings are being cleared to make room. Elkus Manfredi Architects of Boston is designing. The Memphis office of Yates Construction is building it. Completion is targeted for 2029.

ARC II is the second Advanced Research Center on the campus, joining the existing Inspiration4 Advanced Research Center. It sits inside St. Jude’s FY2022-2027 strategic plan, a $12.9 billion program with more than $2 billion committed to construction and capital projects. St. Jude expects the building to support roughly 2,000 new research and support positions.

The program is laboratories and research support rather than clinical care, which makes it one of the largest single-owner lab buildings under construction in the Southeast.

Why It Matters

A 130-lab tower is a mechanical and vibration problem before it is an architectural one. Exhaust stacks, shaft space, floor-to-floor heights, vibration criteria for imaging and bench work: those decisions get locked early and they’re expensive to revisit. The permit split, with structure and systems running more than six times the foundation package, is a clean illustration of where money goes on this building type.

Stacking labs 13 floors high instead of spreading them across a low-rise campus is the move where land is constrained, and it forces harder calls on flexibility. Research groups reconfigure. Vertical distribution makes that costlier every time.

The funding model is the other point of interest. This is philanthropic capital raised through ALSAC, with no public debt and no tenant to satisfy, which changes the risk profile for the delivery team and removes the leasing pressure that usually drives lab schedules. For Memphis, it returns 5.8 acres of the Pinch District to use and adds roughly 2,000 jobs.

Project Team & Details