SSM St. Clare Health Center, St. Louis County, Mo.Type of facility: Replacement hospital
Project architect: HGA Architects and Engineers
Construction manager: Alberici Constructors
Completed: April 2009
Size: 430,000 square feet
Cost: $148 million
Cost per square foot: $344
While most award winners in the
Modern Healthcare design contest are honored for fitting so well into their environments, SSM St. Clare Health Center—located in a developing area outside of St. Louis—took the opposite approach.
“Instead of being contextual, we break from the environment and offer a respite,” says Kurt Spiering, vice president and leader of the national healthcare practice group at Milwaukee-based HGA Architects and Engineers. “Your views are of a landscaped hillside, and you don't see the adjoining commercial clutter. It's a very quiet service area even though it's close to two busy highways.”
Spiering says the hospital was built on a 54-acre parcel in a low, bowl-shaped area that was part of an old golf course, and its “ground” floor is really the second floor so the lobby views are of treetops.
View the Design Awards photo gallery
Read more profiles of the Design Awards winners“This made the project fun,” Spiering says, adding that the project became affectionately known as “the treehouse.”
With 154 private inpatient rooms, an emergency department, inpatient and outpatient surgery facilities, a cancer center and a 150,000-square-foot medical office building, SSM St. Clare Health Center—built as a replacement for the 54-year-old 187-bed St. Joseph Hospital of Kirkwood (Mo.)—is reportedly the first new hospital built in St. Louis County in 35 years.
As such, Spiering says SSM Health Care wanted to “reinvent healthcare and the experience their patients receive.”
Spiering says the design process resulted in creating four basic zones.
There is a “marketplace” zone for outpatient visits, which he describes as “get in, get my test, go home.”
In the “hotel” zone, patients come in for short-term procedures and any related preparation and recovery times.
For long visits, patients visit the “condominium” zone, offering a homelike environment with family space.
Then there is the “factory element” or “performance zone” for activities such as major surgery or diagnostic imaging, where the focus is on “making sure the staff has everything they need when they need it,” Spiering says.
“When you come to this facility, it's not business as usual,” he says.
