AIA Selects Three Projects for National Healthcare Design Awards

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Academy of Architecture for Health (AAH) have selected the recipients of the AIA National Healthcare Design Awards program. The AIA Healthcare Awards program showcases the best of healthcare building design and healthcare design-oriented research. Projects exhibit conceptual strengths that solve aesthetic, civic, urban, and social concerns as well as the requisite functional and sustainability concerns of a hospital.

Serving as jurors for the 2009 awards were: Stephen Yundt, AIA of CO Architects, Los Angeles; Julie Snow, FAIA of Julie Snow Architects, Minneapolis; Rand Elliot, AIA of Elliott & Associates Architects, Oklahoma City, OK; Rolf Haarstad, AIA of Hord Coplan Macht, Inc., Baltimore; Tom Howorth, AIA of Howorth Architects P.A., Oxford, MS.

“The health facility building type is being positively transformed by designs that incorporate: advances in technology; research findings from evidence based design (improving quality of care); elements of sustainable architecture; all within more humane, healing environments,” said national jury chair Stephen Yundt, AIA, ACHA. “This year’s entries (close to a hundred in total) reinforced the fact that the hospital of the future is here and bears little resemblance to facilities designed just a few years ago.”

The AIA AAH selected three healthcare facilities in three separate categories; Category A: - built, less than $25 million (construction cost), Category B: built, more than $25 million (construction cost), and Category C: unbuilt.

The recipients include:

Providence North Portland Clinic, Portland, OR
Mahlum

Located on the mass-transit MAX line in Portland’s urban core, the building engages the busy streetscape to reinforce visual connection and invite the community inside. An upturned butterfly rood creates the frame for an expansive wall of windows. The interior is divided into three day-lit clinical pods faced with integrated murals that can be viewed by patients and families within the clinic, as well as those passing by. The design heals a brown-field site condition, while providing a transition between the high volume street and the residential neighborhood beyond. By reinforcing connections with the neighborhood, the clinic supports revitalization efforts in the area while making community health services more transparent and accessible.

Oregon Health and Science University – Peter O. Kohler Pavilion, Portland, OR
Perkins+Will in Joint Venture with Petersen Kolberg & Associates

A 75 foot terrain drop from north to south across the site allowed the concealment of a 450-car parking garage into the hill, below a reconstructed street. South (city) elevations introduce natural daylight and provide dramatic views of Mt. Hood through a floor-to-ceiling curtain wall; north walls facing into the historic heart of the campus are articulated with punched windows in campus brick and stone. Cascading landscaped roof decks provide both intimate healing gardens and public view terraces open to the views. The Pavilion integrates a 9th floor campus-wide “pedestrian superhighway” throughout, linking campus patient care and research zones, and harbors a new aerial tram terminus…connecting the campus to waterfront parking and campus buildings below.

Cancer Center, Hospital, Cancer Research Institute
HKS, Inc. in Joint Venture with UHS Building Solutions

To support the client’s mission to reduce the burden of cancer by integrating scientific discoveries and technological advances into more effective treatments and prevention strategies, the design driver for the project stemmed from integration. Located along a major river in the Northeast, the new facility will provide an unparalleled combination of clinics, a full-service hospital and research labs. The design solution originated from the integration of water – ‘the source of life, the simplest form of regeneration and growth.” Water connects the buildings to one another, to the site as well as the river. It will be the driver for the orientation and siting of the three primary services: research, hospital and clinics. Circulation paths between buildings become glass boxes that dematerialize and sit within the landscape, providing an indoor-outdoor duality.

Images: AIA