Healthcare Design - June/July 2016 - 88

F FIRST LOOK | 07.16
Adding up

The tops of two existing wings were
peeled off to allow a three-story
addition to Sentara Norfolk General
Hospital in Norfolk, Va.
MORE ONLINE To see additional renderings of the Sentara Norfolk General
Hospital addition, visit healthcaredesignmagazine.com/first-look-sentara.

to one of the new floors, from a dark, labyrinthine
space divided by curtains to private and semi-private
rooms with natural light.
Plans also call for a helipad and dedicated elevator
on the roof of the Kaufman wing for the hospital-based
Nightingale Regional Air Ambulance and others to
accommodate 1,200 landings per year from medical,
Navy, and Coast Guard helicopters.
To address resiliency concerns (Norfolk ranks second to New Orleans in flood risk from ocean rise), radiology assets will move from ground level to the third
floor. Two of the hospital's six emergency generators at
grade level will also be elevated during the project.
Energy conservation was addressed in the design,
too. For example, the new floors will be enclosed by
light-sensitive glass, which functions much like variable
eyeglasses and darkens on hot days to minimize energy consumption while preserving exterior views-in
this case, the busy Elizabeth River. Exterior cladding
will be a heavy ceramic terra cotta that complements
the color of the existing wings' exterior brick walls.
The project is currently in construction, with
completion scheduled for September 2020. HCD

Top: River Pavilion, seen from
the west, will offer a dramatic
presentation both day and
night after completion of the
three-floor addition to the top
of the building. Above: New
"sky lobby" spaces will afford
high views of the Elizabeth
River through electrochromic
glass that darkens with sunlight and heat while preserving
exterior visibility.

Do you have a new project to share? Email Jennifer Kovacs Silvis at jennifer.silvis@emeraldexpo.com for details on how to contribute a First Look.
88 HCDmagazine.com 07.16

SENTARA HEALTHCARE/HDR

Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in Norfolk, Va., is a
525-bed tertiary referral center with wings built in the
1960s, 1980s, and 1990s and also includes Sentara
Heart Hospital, which opened in 2006. It shares an
urban campus with Children's Hospital of The King's
Daughters and Eastern Virginia Medical School. The
campus accommodates more than 18,000 cars,
buses, trucks, and ambulances every day.
Patients arrive at the destination medical center
from 28 states and several countries for heart, cancer,
neurology, and urology care. However, the aging
facilities don't match the hospital's clinical sophistication. Buildings added over decades don't function well
together for staff or patients.
A facilities master plan created in 2009 established
guiding principles of enhancing the patient experience;
maximizing efficiency, flexibility, and financial feasibility
of existing structures; identifying services, product
lines, and departments to expand or develop; and
improving resilience from potential flooding caused by
ocean rise and subsidence.
To enhance the patient experience, specifically,
goals include creating modern-sized patient rooms
that optimize efficiency in care delivery, improving and
simplifying access and wayfinding as well as travel
between parking areas and points of care, and creating public and private corridors to offer patient rooms
more privacy from visitor traffic.
With those goals in mind, Sentara Healthcare approved plans for a five-year, $199 million project to add
three floors each to its Kaufman and River Pavilion
wings, expand and modernize 18 ORs dating to 1986,
consolidate 54 specialized ICU beds on two of the
new floors, and expand the ED.
In studying original plans for the wings, architect
HDR discovered that both were designed for upward
expansion. Peeling off the concrete roof caps exposed
90 vertical steel columns protruding above the existing
buildings, which can be welded onto and extended.
Specific details of the 374,000-square-foot project
include replacing an old ward-style NICU with modern facilities able to handle 150,000 patient days per
year for premature, drug-addicted, and other highrisk newborns. The special care nursery will transition

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Healthcare Design - June/July 2016

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