How 3 West Coast Facilities are Innovating Health Care Design

Truly thoughtful architecture is capable of facilitating health—and can even directly contribute to saving lives. Here are just a few examples of health care design at its finest, starting with Central City Concern’s (CCC) Blackburn Building in Portland, Oregon. It will serve the city’s homeless and drug-recovering population.

Blackburn Building. Portland, OR

But it’s the less traditional design elements that captivate most. Take the bathrooms. Since so much of the homeless population that CCC serves is grappling with drug addiction, they knew they had to design a better bathroom—one that doesn’t double as a magnet for users, a place to get high.

Once a restroom guest flips the occupancy lock, a timer begins to silently tick off. If a significant amount of time passes, a light that’s visible from a nearby staffed desk illuminates, notifying the help.

“They can then check on the occupant to make sure there’s no emergency. We’re trying to literally save lives,” Kiersey says.

Sobrato Pavilion, Fruitdale, CA

Another feature worthy of highlight is the new lobby link, a beautiful, two-story lit atrium full of greenery (“basically a conservatory space,” Codd says) that connects the pavilion to an existing building on-campus.

“It’s a place where patients, if they’re able to on their own, and general visitors can gather and contemplate. It’s elements like that that go above and beyond garden variety clinical care,” Codd says.

Blending the facility smoothly into the landscaping was also a paramount concern, with a notable illustration being the pavilion’s extensive green roofing.

The project could also be seen as emblematic of the political will that exists in California, at both the legislative level and the ballot box, to tackle climate change. Governor Jerry Brown signed into law in 2018 a pledge to make the state carbon-neutral by 2045, and as pointed out by Jude Chakraborty, an associate at Stantec who helped ensure the project’s LEED certification, every facility, old and new, will need to assess its energy usage vis-à-vis that criteria.

“Health care is being very stringent [about energy consumption] on new constructions,” Chakraborty says. “And as architects at Stantec, our advice helps guide those decisions. We’re getting them to where they should be, and things are looking good.”

Of course, a building need not be tailored toward saving lives in order to promote wellness and healthy habits. The recently opened University of Washington Life Sciences Building, in Seattle, encourages physical movement, embraces natural daylight in an innovative way, and reactivates visitors’ appreciation of the natural world.

The 207,000-square-foot project incorporates natural ventilation cooling, chilled heating and cooling beams, and solar roofs, but the most noteworthy feature might be the building’s anchor: a 20,000 square-foot greenhouse that gathers together 9,000-plus plants across 3,400 species.

Students at the university study the plant life, of course, but the facility also opens its doors to the general public and hosts K-12 visits. It’s positioned next to the largest commuter trail in Seattle, and the site “further promotes sustainability with a water reclamation system that directs surplus water from the building to irrigate the plants,” according to Devin Kleiner, the project architect and a senior associate at Perkins+Will.

It encourages you to walk around, too. The architects designed the suspended open stair with the specific intention to “lure people up the six flights” and take in views of nature and the campus.

The stairs were made visible from outside in order to draw visitors’ attention and encourage their use. But if you must take the elevator, your ride will at least be transportive in more than just the up or down sense.

The core was enveloped in custom-milled wood slabs, culled from nine 200-foot Douglas firs, that taper as they rise, mimicking the natural bloom of the trees—which were donated by UW biology professor Scott Freeman and his wife, Susan Leopold Freeman, who happens to be the granddaughter of iconic conservationist Aldo Leopold.

The elevator sports two more irresistible design novelties. Instead of the usual ding sound, the elevator makes birdsong sounds that correspond with the height at which a particular bird would actually nest, and lights are positioned to glow through the slabs, “recreating the experience of the sun shining between the silhouettes of backlit trees,” Kleiner says.

The wood design brought about some unexpected interactions as well.

“One of the surprising wellness benefits of the elevator core design is that people seem unable to resist touching the wood. This … raised a thought-provoking hypothesis that in today’s urban society, we are disconnected from nature and therefore crave making physical contact with it,” Kleiner says.