‘Up into the sky’: On site at the Waikato med school build

Tuesday, 7 July 2026

After years of planning and artist's impressions, Waikato’s new medical school is now physically changing the skyline.

It may still be more than a year from completion, but the four-storey teaching and learning building is progressing quickly, with the first stages of its steel frame reaching above the University of Waikato campus.

Fosters Project Manager Blanton Benjamin said good weather over the last few months meant the ground floor slab had been finished ahead of schedule.

Showing the Waikato Times around the site on Monday, he pointed to the thick, 732 m³ layer of concrete from which the building would rise.

It took the contents of 134 concrete trucks to lay this base after construction officially launched last December. Fencing has largely kept the groundwork from view, but the vertical build will be more visible.

Over the whirring and roaring of construction equipment, while workers in hard hats and hi-vis criss-crossed the site, Benjamin described how the raft slab build meant deep foundations weren’t needed.

“That slab is 600 [mm] thick, and made up of a lot of reinforcing.”

The lift pit was the only deep excavation for the building, although as part of the project, a nearby pit had been dug, which now held a 145,000-litre underground tank, 6.5 metres underground.

It would support both the new building and the wider campus with greater supply and firefighting capability, Benjamin said.

It was great to see the project rising from the ground, he said. At his site office, he could look at the project plans via the 3D model on his computer, then look out the door and see it becoming reality.

For example, the bones of a staircase were already rising from the ground floor, while the 3D model showed the floating staircase that would continue access to the higher floors in future.

The Fosters tower crane was an eye-catching part of the project, towering 25 metres above the ground and illuminated at night. Benjamin said the heaviest lifts it had been tasked with so far were the 13.4-tonne K-frames.

“It's a luffing crane… We can lift up to 2.5 tonnes at 55 metres and up to 22 tonnes in close vicinity.”

The first stage of structural steel installation, from the ground floor to level two, was progressing well.

“The second stage of structure will take us further up into the sky.”

The university was a busy site, he said, and it had been challenging to work out the interaction with existing services. As for the highlight, it was the whole process so far.

“You get a lot of satisfaction from delivering something that's gunna be a landmark for many years to come.”

He had worked on other projects, including three hospitals, and enjoyed being able to drive past the finished buildings.

“This one, because it's so pivotal to the campus of Waikato, the cool thing is when we started standing structural steel. Coming in from… a meeting, I just started to see it poke its head up.”

At the moment there were between 40 and 50 workers on site, but this would increase to many as 120 during the later phases, he said.

Picking one word to sum up the build, Blanton said it was “collaboration” due to the partnership with the university and others.

Division of Health Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor Jo Lane said seeing the structure emerge from the ground was an exciting moment for everyone involved in the project.

“After several years of planning, it is fantastic to see the design come to life. The facility will bring students from a range of health professions together, reflecting the collaborative way that modern healthcare is delivered,” he said.

Construction was scheduled for completion by the end of next year, ahead of the arrival of the first cohort of medical students in 2028.