ASU Health Headquarters Building

Arizona State University spent six decades without a medical school. The building that changes that broke ground in April 2026 in downtown Phoenix, a roughly 200,000-square-foot, $200 million facility in the Phoenix Bioscience Core with a hard deadline: it has to be open before the fall 2028 semester.

Project Scope

McCarthy Building Companies is general contractor, working with CO Architects and DFDG Architects on design. Site work started in spring, with vertical construction beginning in July 2026. The building sits on a block bounded by Fillmore and Pierce Streets and 4th and 5th Streets, next to existing biomedical tenants including TGen and the University of Arizona College of Medicine–Phoenix.

Program is the interesting part. The building serves as headquarters for ASU Health and houses the John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering, the Health Observatory at ASU, and the School of Technology for Public Health. That mix drives an unusual set of spaces for a medical building: standard anatomy and simulation suites alongside engineering labs and computational research floors, which have different vibration, power and cooling requirements than clinical teaching space. Accreditation timelines set the schedule, and accreditation site visits require finished, operational facilities rather than a construction schedule showing they’ll be ready.

Why It Matters

ASU is entering medical education by building an engineering-forward school rather than a conventional one, and the building is the argument. Pairing a medical school with medical engineering and public health technology under one roof is a bet that the shortage worth solving is not just physicians but people who can build and deploy the systems physicians use.

Arizona has a real physician supply problem. The state ranks well below the national average in primary care physicians per capita, and residency capacity has lagged population growth for years. A new allopathic school in downtown Phoenix does not fix residency slots by itself, but it does add the pipeline’s front end in the state’s largest metro. The project is also the centerpiece of an ASU capital slate running to hundreds of millions across campuses in 2026.

Project Team & Details