Site work has started on Iowa’s most-expensive construction project to date, a $2.2-billion patient care tower to be built on the north side of The University of Iowa Healthcare campus in Iowa City.

The general contractor for the 842,000-sq-ft patient care tower is JE Dunn; the architect is Neumann Monson Architects, which has offices in Iowa City and Des Moines. The number of floors and renderings have not yet been released.

To make way for the new tower, the Iowa Board of Regents, which governs public higher educational institutions in the state, recently approved spending about $75 million for the enabling work and granted a request to demolish a parking ramp, a water tower next to Kinnick Stadium and the Wendall Johnson Speech and Hearing Center. All three structures are located within the footprint of the new tower and are slated to be razed in the fall.

The speech and hearing center will be relocated to a new Health Sciences Academic Building this summer, while the parking ramp is being replaced by a the “Hawkeye Parking Ramp” already constructed north of Kinnick Stadium, and additional parking capacity is being added at the nearby Arena Ramp, now being built near the Dental Science Building and Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

“The water tower is being replaced by a new, larger tower under construction near Carver-Hawkeye Arena,” said Vessel Taylor, a spokesperson for the University of Iowa Healthcare. “The larger tower is sized to serve the future inpatient tower and the rest of the university campus and hospital system.”

The contractor for the new water tower is ENGIE North America.

The tower project is planned to include a multi-story concourse that is planned to connect the new tower to the main hospital and other facilities, an inpatient surgery platform, a skywalk to link the tower to parking ramps, shelled space for future expansion and adaptation and a tunnel to connect the tower to support services.

Following the enabling work, the next phase of construction is mass excavation and deep foundation work, slated to start in January, followed by tower construction, expected to start in December 2026. Completion is expected in 2032.

The board of regents also is seeking a third-party consulting or auditing firm to provide monthly reports to the board’s chief audit executive and senior administrators, focusing on cost verification, contract compliance, claims review and payment validation.

The tower may have a short stint as Iowa’s most costly construction project, though, as Google is planning a nearly $7-billion expansion of its Cedar Rapids data center campus. MidAmerican Energy also saw its planned $3.9-billion renewable energy project approved by the Iowa Utilities Commission in 2023, but construction has not yet begun on it.