A beacon of blue glass keeps watch over the Medical Mile in Grand Rapids, Mich. It’s the new Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital (HDCH), and it represents the melding of excellence in patient care with sustainable design and construction. Encompassing 440,000 square feet over 14 floors, the new hospital tower has a curtainwall of arctic blue glass that has become an icon of form and function.
The team at Grand Rapids–based Spectrum Health set the bar high for its new building and brought on Dallas-based architect Jonathan Bailey Associates to meet that bar of high-quality design and functional goals. “We had an interest in not only making the building efficient from a clinical basis, but also to stand as an iconic, significant building in our community to exemplify the level of care that we offer here,” says Steve Coates, director of design and construction at Spectrum Health.
Rather than emulate the typical horizontal sprawl of many health care buildings, the new tower’s design is intended to draw the eye up and emphasize verticality. Eliminating horizontal banding was a primary component of that plan, and the aluminum-and-glasscurtainwall accomplishes that task beautifully. “At the perimeter, where the aluminum hits the floor slab, [it] was cantilevered off the scale,” explains David Byl, senior project manager at URS Health in Grand Rapids. URS began the project as the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineers, and took over mid-project as architectural consultants. “The scale was beefed up and then the floor was cantilevered over 2 to 3 feet, so you really don’t see any horizontal line to the floor line.”
Because the floor line is behind the mullion, it doesn’t break the clean sweep of glass when viewed from the outside. “You go from a deep beam, and then the last 2 or 3 feet there are just little beams that kind of go up to the end, and you can’t see those from the outside. It looks like one piece of glass all the way up the outside,” Byl says.
Building information modeling (BIM) helped identify potential issues with the radial design. “We did the mechanical and electrical systems [using] BIM, which was really successful,” says Timothy Gray, project superintendent for Wolverine Building Group, also in Grand Rapids. “It really paid off because of all the utilities we had to put in.”
The curtainwall system is a unitized, interlocking aluminum skin, which required close attention to detail during installation. Tight quality control ensured that the floors slabs were level and ready to support the aluminum frame. High-performance, four-element fritted glass panels were then used to cover the exterior and keep the building cooler in summer and warmer in winter. The 50 percent frit pattern lets light through even where the fritting is heavy, offering views without the feeling of being too open to the outside.
A 194-foot-long, glass-enclosed bridge connects the parking garage to the main lobby and was constructed of 10-inch tube steel, built in sections and then trucked to the site for assembly. “Everything we did in the HDCH was for kids,” Coates says. “It’s amazing how many visitors have walked in through the bridge and into the lobby saying, ‘This can’t be a hospital.’ ”
Making people comfortable was a top priority for the new HDCH tower. The amount of natural light bathing the interior is intended to make the hospital’s young patients feel better. “I think the design really creates a safe feeling,” Coates says. “The more light you have, the better the patient is going to feel.” The core of the building receives a large dose of natural light, which is good for the staff, too.
The Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital is expected to soon receive LEED certification from the Washington, D.C.–based U.S. Green Building Council, and is already making a difference to the patients it serves. “The kids come into the main lobby and it’s nothing like a hospital that you would envision,” Gray says. “They love it.”
Julie Knudson writes about architecture from Seattle, Wash.