Healthcare Design - March 2023 - 23

the artwork, and the choices made putting the art in there, just made the
project many times better. "
NOW AND LATER
The Glick Center is primed for the future thanks to its intense flexibility,
but the team also took advantage of design and construction innovations
of today to streamline the delivery. In fact, Chuck Kostrab, vice president
and operations manager for Turner Construction, says the building itself
was more " assembled " than " constructed. " For example, the team
worked to identify which building elements could be prefabricated and
preassembled, such as all of the patient room headwalls and the exterior
building cladding as well as 86 miles of piping that was unitized, welded,
and prepared off-site.
The IPD-like collaboration and big room environment also gave the
team the ability to constantly make adjustments to the project as necessary,
Kostrab says. What supported that on-the-fly decision-making
was a dedicated virtual reality room within the transformation center
that allowed the team to virtually walk through renderings to validate
both designs and cost estimates. " That was a huge eye opener and
allowed us to make sure we're providing cost certainty based on the
design intent, " Kostrab says. Virtual reality was used for user group
meetings, as well, interior designer Bautista adds, saying it permitted
staff members to help the team determine where to orient walls or
which are solid or glass to promote visibility
and sight lines.
Patient floors 3-9 are identical, each housing
the two 24-room units with staff work cores that
are 100 percent adaptable thanks to modular
furniture, demountable walls, and a grid of outlets
in the floors, Bautista says. " That was quite
the challenge-it became a question of grid sizes,
how much flexibility do you want? " she says.
The team assessed the high cost of placing a grid
of outlets at a very high density versus them being
so far apart it wouldn't be of value. " We landed
somewhere in the middle where we tried to
think about all of the scenarios and do our best
to accommodate a future that is unknown. "
The unknowns of the future are precisely
what spurred Jones' process-neutral approach
overall and the goal to deliver a building that's
an open box with few spaces designed for a specific
department or task. By relying on HGA's
expertise regarding best practices in hospital
design as opposed to those of building users, it
avoids an inevitable hurtle that most large projects
face: Half of staff members initially consulted
in the design process are no longer with
the organization at the conclusion of the project
or provide insight on or requests for solutions
that inevitably become outdated. The result is a
building designed specifically for functions described
10 years prior and that don't apply anymore,
Jones says.
Instead, staff were consulted for specifics,
such as the need to provide laboring tubs in labor
and delivery rooms and other unique space
requirements for specialized spaces. " If we
make the environment as adaptable as we can,
then we don't need to worry about asking the
question, 'How are you going to do what you're
going to do?' " he says.
Bultman says the directive caused HGA to
pause and reconsider how the firm had traditionally
approached design, particularly its
mission to create spaces that support the most
efficient, Lean operations possible-essentially,
to design space to support specific processes.
" Walter's idea of 'well, wait a minute, that might
be backwards' was really industry challenging, "
he says. " The problem with [Lean] is that five
years later when you change how you want to do
something, now the space isn't very flexible. "
Where process-neutral is most evident in the
Glick Center is in the inpatient units and interventional
platform. The 85-room interventional
platform is entirely universal across prep and
recovery so that as services shift or volumes go
up or down, the platform can flex, Bultman says.
MARCH 2023
23
NIC LEHOUX ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Healthcare Design - March 2023

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