Healthcare Design - March 2016 - 34
O HT I NT IG Building a park into a hospital Turning that ambition into reality was a lengthy process involving the nearly two-year design competition phase followed by 20 months of design development. Construction started in 2013, and the 645,834-squarefoot hospital opened in October 2015. The functional program called for 270 beds, a large critical care area, 16 operating theaters, and outpatient services. BDP added another goal to the project list: to provide every room with a view of the park. The first step was to orient the building from north to south on the new 12-acre site to maximize daylight and park views from all of the rooms. Then, instead of a traditional stacked hospital, BDP proposed a trio of green-roofed buildings, or "fingers," that are joined at a main concourse, which allows the buildings, courtyards, and park to interweave "like hands embracing," Zucchi says. The lower floors of the three buildings house clinical services and departments, including the operating theaters, imaging, and an emergency department, while an interstitial level for offices and building services is located on one of the middle floors of each of the buildings. The top two floors with the best views are reserved for the patient wards. The approach resulted in a site that's half the size of the former hospital and with nearly 90 percent of the patient rooms and 70 percent of the inhabited rooms getting a view to the park, Zucchi says. The other patient rooms face south toward the main road and entrance plaza. The natural slope of the park site and the undulating shape of the three buildings provide a memorable design but also one that was flexible enough to adapt to changes that occurred over the course of the project. For example, after the initial design phase, Zucchi says it was clear that the surgery department needed to be bigger, so the footprint of the lower floors in that building was widened. "It didn't really matter if it was wider or longer because we could just play with the shape within the overall profile of the hill," Zucchi says. "There was no perfect form we were trying to stay true to." In another mid-project alteration, Alder Hey asked to move more patient beds in the critical care unit to the outside wall of the middle building to increase access to daylight. The change was achieved by reconfiguring the rectilinear layout with clusters of eight beds and a central staff area that would bow out from the building in a series of scalloped shapes. "We could leave the upper floors the way they were and just accept that we gained a kind of roof garden above those areas and go with the flow of it," he says. Playful features The clinical buildings connect to a bright and airy five-story concourse that runs north to south on campus and serves as the main spine. Visitors enter from either the main entrance at the south end or a new 1,200-space garage on the east side. The atrium houses the main reception area, outpatient arrival and reception, a café/restaurant, meeting and conference rooms, retail, and a performance space. The two public elevators sit between the clinical buildings. 34 HCDmagazine.com 03.16 Above: Staff workstations at the center of each eightbed bay in the critical care department have a skylight to help bring daylight into interior spaces. Left: The clinical care buildings feature a rippled shape that gradually slopes to the ground on the western side of campus, which accommodates grass growing on the rooftops and plays up the effect of the park landscape flowing over the hospital. DAVID BARBOUR ER NAL S P TL TIO NA
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.