Details of the largest healthcare construction project in North America revealed by CannonDesign and NEUF architect(e)s

The Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) is currently the largest healthcare construction project in North America and also one of the largest in the world. Encompassing over 3 million sf and two full city blocks, the new CHUM complex will merge three older hospitals - St-Luc, Hôtel-Dieu and Notre-Dame – into one cohesive campus.

As CanadianArchitect.com reports, phase one of the project is nearing completion and will include 772 single-bed patient rooms, 39 operating theaters, and over 400 clinics and examination rooms. Each private patient room includes space for family involvement and large windows with views of the city. Considering the size of the project, a relatively small number of standardized room templates were used to design the vast majority of the more than 12,000 overall rooms in the building. The hopes are that the completed hospital will help to revitalize the east end of Montreal’s downtown core.

Phase one of the project includes all the patient rooms, operating theaters, diagnostic and therapeutics, and the Oncology program while the second and final phase of the project will include offices, a conference center, and a few ambulatory spaces. Phase One is nearing completion while Phase Two has a completion date of 2021. By completing all of the hospital’s core healthcare facilities in the first phase, it allows the area’s population to benefit from the hospital immediately, as opposed to waiting until 2021.

The large campus includes loads of public space with the intention of making the campus feel more intimate and welcoming. The main entrance of the CHUM campus has been designed as a large inner courtyard and a copper-clad amphitheatre doubles as a wayfinding reference.

In Quebec, it is required that at least one percent of a public development’s budget be put toward the integration of art, and the new CHUM campus goes well beyond that number. The completed campus will have 13 large-scale works of art incorporated into the design and, as reported by Canadian Architect, will have the highest concentration of public art in Montreal since Expo 67 (what is often considered the most successful World’s Fair of the 20^th century).

For more information and to view additional images of the project, click here.

Image courtesy of CannonDesign and NEUF architect(e)s

During the second week of November, the architecture firm NBBJ launched a podcast series called Uplift, that focuses on the transformative power of design. Its first 30-minute episode homed in on designing for behavioral healthcare facilities, a hot topic given the increasing number of new construction and renovation projects in this subsector.

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