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.
Ohio State’s own Facilities Design and Construction office notes that the project has already been honored outside the university: the Wexner Medical Center University Hospital was named Project of the Year in the 2026 Building Columbus Awards, Columbus Business First’s annual program recognizing projects for excellence in design, development and construction and for their impact on the community.
The Walsh-Turner team broke ground on the project in 2020 and managed the build through six years of construction on a tight, active medical campus. The joint venture says it turned over areas of the hospital an average of 40 days early and reached substantial completion ahead of schedule — a notable outcome on a project of this complexity, where the work proceeded alongside a functioning hospital.
The build also delivered benefits next door. As part of the University Hospital project, construction activities supported the neighboring Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center — the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute — tying the new tower into the wider campus it will serve.
Education is built into the design as well. The facility supports Ohio State’s teaching mission by integrating students and multidisciplinary care teams directly into clinical areas, so the doctors, nurses and specialists the university trains learn in the same spaces where patients are treated.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on
What we know: construction is complete, the tower is 26 stories and 1.9 million square feet with 820 beds, the project cost $1.5 billion, and it has been named the 2026 Building Columbus Project of the Year, according to Ohio State and the Walsh-Turner Joint Venture. What we are still waiting on: Ohio State has not, in the releases reviewed for this story, published a patient move-in or public opening schedule for the tower, and NewsForce247 is not inventing one — completion of construction and the start of clinical operations are two different milestones.
The tower also lands in a Columbus that keeps adding healthcare capacity. Earlier this fall, Ohio State celebrated the completion of Outpatient Care Powell with a July 23 ribbon cutting, according to the university’s Facilities Design and Construction office — a reminder that the hospital tower is the largest piece of a broader building program, not a one-off.
For patients across central Ohio, the practical effect arrives when the doors open: more modern rooms, expanded emergency and surgical capacity, and a flagship hospital built for the region’s growth. A 820-bed tower does not just serve Columbus; referral hospitals like University Hospital draw patients from across Ohio, including smaller communities whose own hospitals transfer their most complex cases to the capital.
The completion also closes a construction chapter that ran through the heart of the pandemic era and its aftermath. Ground was broken in 2020, and the joint venture’s account of the build emphasizes logistics as much as scale: staging a 1.9-million-square-foot tower on a four-acre site, in the middle of a working hospital campus, while keeping the surrounding medical center operating. That the team reports finishing areas early, rather than late, is the detail university planners are most likely to underline — on hospital projects, schedule slips translate directly into delayed capacity for patients who have nowhere else in the region to get the same level of care.
What happens next is Ohio State’s move-in and opening sequence for the tower, which the university will announce on its own timetable. When the Wexner Medical Center publishes that schedule — and the first patient dates that come with it — NewsForce247 will update this coverage.
Photo: Jsjessee, CC BY-SA 2.0