In this age of transparency, healthcare architects are being just as diligent to deliver results, only from a different perspective: placing a premium on sunlight as well as the use of indoor and outdoor trees and plants. They’re also finding ways to connect and unify existing buildings with new construction.
Looking at pictures of the Arizona Cancer Center’s new outpatient Peter and Paula Fasseas Cancer Clinic at University Medical Center North, there is no mistaking its location. It is unmistakably the Southwest desert.
The thing that affected this project the most is that it projected a feeling of wellness,” says Michael Smith, president and chief executive officer of Seattle-based Mahlum Architects and principal in charge of the new Providence Newberg (Ore.) Medical Center. “This is really a wellness center, and—if you need a hospital bed—we’ve got some out back.”
In August 2005, a new hospital opened in Vancouver, Wash., and for the first time in its 150-year history, Southwest Washington Medical Center had competition. It looked to Seattle-based architects NBBJ for help facing up to the challenge.
In addition to the use of landscaping and natural light, another feature earning respect from this year’s judges is the effective blending of new and existing structures.
Located on a 44-acre campus in Brooklyn that included 20 buildings ranging in age from 50 to 100 years old, the Kings County Hospital Center was said to be confusing and often intimidating to patients, inefficient and costly to run, and not much to look at. The Skidmore, Owings & Merrill design, implemented over a nine-year period, replaced all patient-care facilities, installed a more-organized site plan and generally transformed and spruced up the complex.
In a Long Island building where weapons-guidance systems were once made and that temporarily housed the first United Nations General Assembly, a young architect named Stanley Cole worked for the firm Harrison & Abramovitz designing a permanent home for the U.N. in Manhattan. After the U.N. headquarters was finished in the early ’50s, the Long Island structure went back to housing a factory for missile gyroscopes, and Cole went on to form EwingCole architects in 1961, says Andrew Jarvis, chairman and chief executive officer of the Philadelphia-based firm.
One of the designs receiving an award is for a facility that will never be built—at least not in the way originally planned. The American British Cowdray Cancer Center in Mexico City, which was to be “shoehorned” onto a site across the street from an existing American British Cowdray hospital, will now be built on a larger location in the same area, says Dan Noble, the principal designer for Dallas-based HKS.
Judges praised the site plan of this project that links the University of Vermont College of Medicine and the new 550,000-square-foot Fletcher Allen Health Care ambulatory-care center with a new 70,000-square-foot medical education center and underground library.
The design award judges would have been hard-pressed to find reasons not to recognize the designs for the Palomar Medical Center West, a Palomar Pomerado Health acute-care center to be built on the bluffs overlooking Escondido, Calif. “How do you deny a shining city on the hill?” asks judge Gerald Oudens, a partner with Oudens Knoop Knoop & Sachs Architects in Chevy Chase, Md., after viewing design illustrations showing an illuminated glass building glowing in the nighttime sky.
Modern Healthcare is pleased to announce the results of its 22nd annual Design Awards, which included four awards for excellence, three honorable mentions, and two citations chosen from 181 entries. The winners—which will be profiled in the magazine’s Sept. 24 issue—were evaluated on design excellence, functional utility, flexibility of design, and response to patients and family. A nine-person jury including healthcare and design architects and healthcare executives served as judges.
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