Ohio State Wexner New University Hospital

Ohio State just opened the biggest building project in its history, and it’s a hospital. The new University Hospital at the Wexner Medical Center opened in February 2026 after a six-year build, a $1.9 billion, 26-story tower that reshapes both the Columbus skyline and the campus’s clinical capacity.

Project Scope. The tower runs about 1.9 million square feet and holds 820 beds, all of them private rooms built to flex as patient needs change. A Turner Construction and Walsh Group joint venture delivered the project under a construction-manager-at-risk model, with Smoot Construction part of the broader team, after breaking ground in 2020. Building a working hospital tower of this size on an active medical campus meant sequencing the structure, the parking and the utilities around live clinical operations next door, a logistics problem as much as a construction one.

Why It Matters. Academic medical centers have spent the past decade replacing aging bed towers with larger, all-private-room facilities, both for infection control and to handle rising patient volumes. Ohio State’s project is one of the largest of that wave, and it consolidates a big share of the system’s inpatient care into a single modern building. For Columbus, it’s a major capital investment landing as the region grows, and a signal of how much of institutional construction spending now flows to healthcare.

Project Team & Details