B+H Architects recently revealed the design of the Patient Support Centre (PSC) located on the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) campus. The 22-story tower represents the first phase of Project Horizon, the SickKids campus redevelopment plan.
The facility will include an undulating façade, a blue ribbon staircase encased in glass, and interdisciplinary education and simulation spaces that will bring physicians, nurses, hospital administration, and Foundation employees together in one collaborative environment.
See Also: Almost Home Kids opens third residence in Illinois for children with health complexities
A cafe and retail atrium at the ground level will activate the public realm and create a new social hub for the surrounding community. The building’s lower floors will be open to the public and include educational and simulation space, a learning institute, a library, and a conference centre. An enclosed pedestrian bridge connects the Peter Gilgan Centre for Research and Learning (PGCRL) and the hospital's main atrium. On the exterior, the building’s undulating facade is equipped with a series of colored horizontal fins that provide shading and optimize thermal performance.
Courtesy B+H Architects.
The PSC is being designed to act as a support system for collaboration, inspiration, and engagement to help strengthen talent performance and foster a thriving organizational culture. “Spaces are no longer siloed”, says Patrick Fejér, Project Lead and Senior Design Principal at B+H, in a release. Fejér goes on to call the PSC “a fully integrated workplace for SickKids staff, one that blurs the lines between indoors and outdoors, health care, office, retail and urban design.”
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
America's Greenest Hospital
Hospitals are energy gluttons. With 24/7/365 operating schedules and stringent requirements for air quality in ORs and other clinical areas, an acute-care hospital will gobble up about twice the energy per square foot of, say, a commercial office building. It is an achievement worth noting, therefore, when a major hospital achieves LEED Platinum status, especially when that hospital attains 14 ...
| Aug 11, 2010
Hospital Additions + Renovations: 14 Lessons from Expert Building Teams
Two additions to a community hospital in Ohio that will double its square footage. A 12-story addition on top of an existing 12-story tower at Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. A $54 million renovation and addition at the University of Virginia Medical Center. A 67-bed, $70 million addition/renovation to a community hospital that is only five years old.
| Aug 11, 2010
Research Facility Breaks the Mold
In the market for state-of-the-art biomedical research space in Boston's Longwood Medical Area? Good news: there are still two floors available in the Center for Life Science | Boston, a multi-tenant, speculative high-rise research building designed by Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, Boston, and developed by Lyme Properties, Hanover, N.
| Aug 11, 2010
3 Hospitals, 3 Building Teams, 1 Mission: Optimum Sustainability
It's big news in any city when a new billion-dollar hospital is announced. Imagine what it must be like to have not one, not two, but three such blockbusters in the works, each of them tracking LEED-NC Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. That's the case in San Francisco, where three new billion-dollar-plus healthcare facilities are in various stages of design and constructi...
| Aug 11, 2010
Holyoke Health Center
The team behind the new Holyoke (Mass.) Health Center was aiming for more than the renovation of a single building—they were hoping to revive an entire community. Holyoke's central business district was built in the 19th century as part of a planned industrial town, but over the years it had fallen into disrepair.
| Aug 11, 2010
Right-Sizing Healthcare
Over the past 30 years or so, the healthcare industry has quietly super-sized its healthcare facilities. Since 1980, ORs have bulked up in size by 53%, acute-care patient rooms by 77%. The slow creep went unlabeled until recently, when consultant H. Scot Latimer applied the super-sizing moniker to hospitals, inpatient rooms, operating rooms, and other treatment and administrative spaces.
| Aug 11, 2010
Great Solutions: Healthcare
11. Operating Room-Integrated MRI will Help Neurosurgeons Get it Right the First Time A major limitation of traditional brain cancer surgery is the lack of scanning capability in the operating room. Neurosurgeons do their best to visually identify and remove the cancerous tissue, but only an MRI scan will confirm if the operation was a complete success or not.
