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| From
Cannon Design (left to right): Kent Turner, Punit Jain,
David Polzin, George Nikolajevich, Craig Norman, Tom Harvath,
and Otto Nichols III of Clayco |
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Cannon Design’s
master architectural plan for Saint Louis University’s $64
million Health Science Center
By Linda F. Jarrett
Saint Louis University has a lofty goal: To attract the brightest
and best researchers to its medical school.
By the end of 2008, the $64 million Health Sciences Center will
open its doors and push the Medical School further up the research
ladder. The striking 10-story structure will rise out of a nine-acre
site at the corner of Grand and Chouteau avenues in Midtown St.
Louis and the new CORTEX bio medical district.
In 2002, SLU hired Cannon Design to do a master architectural plan.
Cannon Principals Tom Harvath, Kent Turner, George Nikolajevich,
and Associate Vice President Punit Jain sat around a table in their
office atop St. Louis Centre. The foggy November day outside the
glass-enclosed room did not diminish their enthusiasm for the project.
 A rendering of the soon-to-be SLU Research Building. |
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“We looked at optimizing the university’s ability to collaborate
in an interdisciplinary way,” says Cannon Principal Tom Harvath.
“The school is currently operating out of at least six different
facilities, many of them small and dated, and some many blocks apart.
We finalized a master plan that envisioned a new interdisciplinary
research building such as this one with approximately 205,000 square
feet, with renovation of approximately 100,000 square feet of the
existing school of medicine building adjacent to the site of this
new research building.”
Kent Turner, principal and regional director of Cannon Design, says
they explored “half a dozen sites and weighed them against
a set of criteria including visibility, access to parking, symbolism,
and the campus environment.”
The nine-acre corner lot fit these criteria and, besides attracting
bright faculty and students, the building will be a focal point
for the University.
“I think their original motivation for the building was derived
from two or three things,” Turner says. “Then was augmented
by the overall cultural baseline at SLU right now which, in large
part, is influenced by Father Lawrence Biondi.
“First, it was motivated by the problems with existing space,
decentralization, inefficiency, and inadequate buildings,”
Turner says. “The second motivation was the continuing competitive
context within which they must thrive as a university.”
Grants play a crucial role in determining the future of medical
schools, particularly medical research laboratories. These facilities
have
to change with the biomedical landscape.
HE+RA Inc. of St. Louis collaborated with Cannon Design and Saint
Louis University in the programming and planning of the facility,
as well as organizing the cost projections for future grant funding
scenarios, among other important tasks.
“One of the things the University was anxious to do was to
create a very flexible facility that could change,” Harvath
says. “We wanted to focus on external grant-funded research,
which has seen a tremendous increase in the past several years.
This pressures a facility to change through time as grants wax and
wane, and be able to convert, for example, a biochemistry lab to
a biology lab, to a bioinformatics lab over time.”
Jain says, “If you look at the plan, there’s a series
of labs, and each researcher can use one, three, or four labs as
the research grows or shrinks. Relative to grant monies, this is
an important factor.”
Turner explained that the schools need the grants, in part, to fund
the capital. “You need researchers to acquire the grants; you
need the facilities to recruit the faculty or researchers. An enormous
part of that effort is finding the equilibrium based on their most
recent history of grant acquisition, recruitment objectives, and
other funding capital capacities of the University and the size
of the existing research space.
“The balance of all that was the ultimate challenge of that
program,” he says.
Nikolajevich says the principals brought their own area of expertise
to the project. “I’m a generalist. I start with a blank
piece of paper with some knowledge of a building type, but far from
what Kent has in health-care, and Tom in research.
“So we start molding this thing from the beginning, then we
put it on the wall and say, ‘What about this?’ and Tom
would say, ‘Well, this is pretty good from your standpoint,
but I don’t think it would work for the lab,’ so we go
back and mold some more.”
The first thing the group did was to analyze the amount of area,
the types of area, and the cost of the area that could be justified.
“It was fairly intriguing,” Harvath says, “How we
went through that process, analyzing their research funding, who
were the highest-funded researchers, what kind of areas they required,
and translating that into dollars per square foot that could be
justified in a new facility.”
From the outset, it was apparent that this would be a unique building.
But it would have to be unique within the confines of the University’s
budgeted amount.
“Buildings of this nature do not come often,” Nikolajevich
says. “And the University was interested in the cost issue,
because
universities do not have money to throw around. Also, they were
interested to see how this building would create a symbol of the
future for Saint Louis University.”
That was one of the reasons for choosing the Grand and Chouteau
location. The site lends itself to the Cannon directive of flexibility.
The contemporary steel, brick and glass building consists of a 10-story
tower at the north with the two lowest floors extending south and
leading to a covered walkway to the School of Medicine.
The first floor contains the main lobby and Clinical Core Lab facilities.
Floors two through eight feature flexible, modular research
laboratories designed for ease of collaboration. Offices are grouped
for easy interaction. Support areas such as tissue culture rooms,
biosafety and special containment labs are housed in the center
for easy access from the other areas. The ninth floor includes a
large conference room along with mechanical equipment.
“We have incorporated a clinical research component into this
building along with the basic research that occurs with the building,”
Harvath says. “All biomedical research facilities aspire to
this aspect and few achieve. That combination of clinical practice
with basic biomedical research is the Holy Grail that all biomedical
research facilities are searching for.”
This “Holy Grail,” according to Harvath, refers to the
ability to minimize the time frame between a study in a basic research
lab and its application in a clinical setting, feedback from the
clinical setting, then back to the basic research venue to fine
tune and refine how the discoveries in the lab are working in the
“real world for real people.”
The building wing that extends toward the medical school will be
for human subject clinical research. Being adjacent to the basic
research lab provides this correlation.
In addition to being a state-of-the-art medical facility, the center
will be built to “green” specifications to incorporate
an environmentally sensitive ethic.
Designing a research center such as this one to adhere to the “green” concept requires more planning than a standard building. One such
challenge will be the HVAC system.
“Because of the nature of the subject inside and the need to
refresh the circulated air more times than in an office building,”
Nikolajevich says, “you are wasting more energy than in other
building types. The air is sucked in and sucked out more times per
hour, and that is a load on the system. The ideal green building
should not use any
energy at all.”
Jain, who is also the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design) consultant, says that independent mechanical systems will
be used to separate the lab components from the offices. “And
with the flexibility built in, you can enlarge or contract the space
without a lot of effort, meaning less cost, less material waste
and less time.
“Green design is not just about energy efficiency, it’s
about efficiency throughout your operations through the 100 or more
years of the life of the building,” he adds.
Also, the building is oriented north for the natural light without
presenting a heat load to the systems, and south for a controllable
heat, not intense like the east and west. High efficiency glass
will absorb heat, and cool the building.
Grass and garden areas will surround the center. Instead of looking
down on a stark black roof, building inhabitants will be treated
to a green “vegetation roof.”
“It will be like a nice garden,” Jain says. “Besides
reduction of temperature, it absorbs rain water. The surplus will
go into a drainage system. This site used to be a series of parking
lots, so there was a huge quantity of storm water runoff. Because
we’ve eliminated those lots and converted to green space, we
don’t need to create detention basins.”
Because of the complexity of this structure, Cannon plans to aim
for “Silver” LEED certification.
“It’s worth mentioning that architects have been applying
some aspects of this green design for quite some time,” Nikolajevich
says. “It was just not ‘in’ to do it then. Our firm
has done some extraordinary things in green architecture for about
25 years.”
“We’ve found that, as LEED has become a touchstone for
evaluating buildings,” Harvath adds, “our basic good design
that we’ve been doing for years gets us quite close to LEED
certification without doing anything that we haven’t been doing
all along.”
The Center is part of a $300 million comprehensive campaign, which
includes $16 million for renovation of existing space at the School
of Medicine. Clayco Construction Company was selected by SLU as
general contractor for the project. “Given our mission as an
educational institution, we seek to be as friendly to the environment
as possible in our building projects and in the management of our
facilities,” says Joe Weixlmann, Ph.D, Saint Louis University
Provost. “Moreover, it seemed particularly important in the
case of a medical research building to make a special commitment
to having it be a “green” facility. This is, after
all, a facility committed, at base, to people’s health.”
Not only will this structure change the University’s landscape
esthetically, it will make a statement about the importance of research
and how it will be done within the walls.
“There’s one model that groups people by department and
another that groups by function,” says Denise Taylor, associate
vice-president for facilities planning. “We’ve taken that
second model with people from various departments who are working
on a common function and located them together.
“Things that might not happen if everyone were in their own
little world,” she says. “This is learning in a more informal
setting. Not everything has to happen in a lab or classroom. It
can happen in the hallway or during discussions, so it’s very
intentional about having people interact with one another.
“It’s a striking design, but also very functional,”
Taylor adds “It’s a very efficient floor plan, and more
than an attractive façade. It’s just as important on
the inside.”
URGENLY
IN NEED OF A CARE CENTER
For years, residents living in the rolling rural
hills of Monroe County had to travel many miles for any type
of medical care. By late next summer, those seeking remedies
for non-life-threatening situations will have to trek no more.
| (Left to right): Kevin Hutchinson, Mayor, Columbia, Ill.; Bill Lyke, St. Elizabeth’s Board of Directors; Sister Ritamary Brown, OSF; Mabel Offerman, (Sold the property to St. Elizabeth’s); Tim Brady, Administrator St. Elizabeth’s Hospital; Dan Reitz, Illinois State Representative; Dave Luechtefeld, Illinois State Senator; Bruce Holland, President Holland Construction Services; Terry Johnson, President Johnson Properties |
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St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, based in Belleville, Ill.,
will be opening the first urgent care center in the county.
Located on four acres off Illinois Route 3 at County Road
EE between Columbia and Waterloo, Ill., the two-story, 30,780-square-foot
facility will offer services such as radiology/imaging, physical
therapy, physicians’ offices and a sleep center. The
radiology
center will give patients access to ultrasound, mammography,
CT scan and MRI procedures.
Craig Steiner, director of marketing and development for St.
Elizabeth’s, says they started looking at the area two
years ago. “We looked at the Columbia market and with
its projected growth, it made a lot of sense for us to reach
out. Part of the hospital’s mission would be to take
help to underserved areas.”
Holland Construction Services is building the $7 million facility,
their 13th project done for St. Elizabeth’s. It is located
next to another Holland project, a new YMCA.
| A rendering of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital Medical Office Building located between Columbia and Waterloo, Ill. |
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“We are honored that St. Elizabeth’s has again chosen
us to team with them in the launch of this significant project
that will improve the quality of life for tens of thousands
of Monroe County residents,” says Bruce Holland, president.
The project was delayed four months because of the possibility
that an Indian village might have once been on the site.
“This area was deemed a ‘hot zone’ from when
we built the YMCA,” Holland says. “They did a title
search and found that there could be archeological findings
on this site.”
Holland went through the state and federal government to get
permission, and then brought in special equipment to find
if there had been a village hundreds of years ago.
“We looked for wood, vegetation, pottery shards, arrowheads,
anything that would indicate a village,” Holland says.
“We also had to get permission from Indian councils in
different states. They said if we found any skeletal remains,
we needed to stop. We also had to have three archeologists
on site at all times while we sifted through the loose top
soil.”
Finding no artifacts, the construction on the facility was
started.
“The people in this area really need this urgent care
center,” Holland says. “And St. Elizabeth’s
is a prime healthcare provider. |
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