Healthcare Design - March 2016 - 34

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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.

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

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Healthcare Design - March 2016

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