Silver Award: Christ Hospital Joint and Spine Center

Cincinnati's Christ Hospital has benefited for decades from its high visibility, perched atop a hill overlooking the city's historic Mount Auburn neighborhood.

“It's one of the taller promontories in the city, but like many hospitals in the country, it was really impacted—locked up” by geography, said Brian Lee, design partner with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. “They didn't see how to move forward.”

“One of the great services we did was help them unlock the campus,” he said.

The project included the seven-story Christ Hospital Joint and Spine Center, which added about 90 inpatient rooms and 12 surgical suites to the hospital campus, newly devised entries and a relocated parking garage with an attached two-story office building.

The changes added “clarity to the campus,” Lee said, and “allowed them to expand the hospital, not just for our facilities but going forward as well.”

The red brick and limestone used on the exterior of the Joint and Spine Center fits in with the building materials used elsewhere in the hospital and in the surrounding neighborhood, a good thing according to judge Henry Chao, a principal with the architecture firm HOK, New York. “To a great degree it's very easy for the architect to say, I'm going to outgun everybody,” Chao said. “I can definitely see that building fit into that campus.”

Modular bathrooms in patient rooms are nestled with those of adjoining rooms to enable light to flow through to the interior. Low-flow plumbing fixtures helped reduce the building's potable water use 21%. Special glazing helped trim lighting and energy costs 21%. Outside, between the old and new structures, is a spacious courtyard, and atop the Joint and Spine Center is a green roof garden.

“We have a series of terraces that run right down the center of the roof to the hospital and runs right next to the community room,” Lee said. The community room and terrace afford stunning 360-degree views of Cincinnati.

“It is a historic hill and the hospital has been there a long, long time,” remaining “a very, big part of that community,” Lee said. Christ Hospital's new construction, it is hoped, will have a “regenerating influence on that neighborhood” and contribute to an urban renaissance already underway as people move back into the city, he said.