COLUMBUS, Ohio — Construction is complete on The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s new University Hospital, a $1.5 billion, 26-story tower that the Walsh-Turner Joint Venture describes as the largest single-facility construction project in the university’s history and the largest single-facility hospital project opening in the United States in 2026.
The finished tower covers 1.9 million square feet on a four-acre site and accommodates 820 beds, according to the Walsh-Turner Joint Venture, the construction team that built it. Inside are state-of-the-art spaces for emergency care, imaging, operating rooms, critical care and medical and surgical units — the full run of services a major academic medical center needs under one roof.
The scale is the story in Columbus. University Hospital is the centerpiece of the Wexner Medical Center, the teaching hospital system attached to Ohio State’s medical school, and a tower of this size reshapes how many patients the system can take at once. With 820 beds in a single new building, the medical center gains modern inpatient capacity designed around current practice rather than retrofitted into older wards…