Contract - October 2014 - 54

Lenox Hill HealthPlex
Architect Perkins Eastman
Client North Shore-LIJ
Health System
Where New York
What 54,000 total square
feet on one floor plus basement
Cost/sf Withheld at
client's request
For a full project source
list, see page 114 or
visit contractdesign.com.

he 1964 headquarters of the National Maritime
Union, a white-painted concrete box with scalloped
overhangs, has always insistently contrasted
with the brownstone gentility of its West Village
neighborhood in New York. The iconoclast nautically themed
building, within which merchant seamen once vied for jobs,
is now home to a much-needed emergency healthcare
provider that advances the state of the art.
Perkins Eastman transformed the ground floor of the
six-story structure into a 28,000-square-foot HealthPlex, as
owner Lenox Hill Hospital, a division of the North Shore-LIJ
Health System, prefers to call it. While the building's origins
were associated with maritime labor, its most recent
incarnation was as a medical office building affiliated with
St. Vincent's Hospital, which closed in 2010 for financial
reasons. The National Maritime Union building remained
standing, though vacant, since the closure of the hospital
across Seventh Avenue that has since been demolished and
will be replaced by condominiums. The St. Vincent's departure
left an emergency services need for Lower Manhattan.

A streamlined procession for patients
Fitting a technology-intense healthcare facility within this
architectural one-off is not as odd an adaptive reuse as one
might expect. The building's original architect, Albert
Ledner-a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple who freely remixed
some of the master's late themes-designed a double-height
hiring hall with a voluptuous glass-block enclosure of paired,
interlocking circles and tucked it beneath the upper floors'

suspended precast-concrete panels. Today, a new Seventh
Avenue entrance welcomes walk-in patients, who proceed
through a glass vestibule and pass into a small lobby where
triage staff determines the severity and urgency of a condition.
To either side, the rounded replacement glass-block
walls soften the geometry of a pair of waiting rooms. In these
rooms, Perkins Eastman interior designer Maureen CarleyVallejo hung colorful globe light fixtures, lined the inner
surface with teak-colored laminate, and drew on the Ledner
theme of interlocking circles in terrazzo floor patterns.
Because the entire facility could be needed for triage, easily
cleanable materials were necessary. Carley-Vallejo was able
to implement a palette of teak, beige, and light blue colors
suggesting the nautical theme that Ledner brought to the
original building.
As the HealthPlex intends to minimize wait times,
patients are quickly taken to one of 26 individual exam rooms
that wrap two large nursing stations with high ceilings. More
high tech than most emergency departments, HealthPlex
incorporates swiveling wall-mounted armatures that hold
devices for doctors to take medical histories, record findings,
print lab-specimen labels, and video consult with specialists-
all while facing the patient. The patient can use a separate
touch-screen monitor for entertainment or to Skype with
their loved ones.
The two nursing stations bookend what is called a
results waiting area. Once examined, patients not needing
beds are moved to these cubicles-equipped with lounge
chairs and iPads-in which tests or caregiver conferences

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Contract - October 2014

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