In the City, Of the City: Lurie Children’s Hospital

“The Crown Sky Garden was not initially in the program,” Barton says, “but we worked with the Kids Advisory Board, and they really wanted a space like this. Some of these kids spend their entire summers indoors, so a space like this—especially in such an urban environment—was really important.”

Other amenities on the 11th floor include the cafeteria, gift shop, and a large conference center, while the 12th floor features a chapel, teen lounge, central playroom, hair salon, and family sleep center. This pair of floors serves as a “second lobby” to the inpatient areas of the facility. “It’s really the family room of the hospital,” says Campbell. “The location of these spaces well above street level also provides great light into the space, as well as great views,” Barton says.

Shifting gears
"One significant challenge was the resolution of the building massing into a cohesive, understandable composition,” Wolf says. “Functional requirements of the diagnostic and treatment floors, which constituted the lower half of the building, in combination with the functional requirements of the bed floors and the top half of the building, resulted in two different geometries, respectively, for these basic floor plates. The overall massing thus is characterized by a marked shift at mid-height of the building, corresponding to the shift in these functions, clearly seen in the setbacks and cantilevers where the shift occurs.”

“This project was driven by stacking more than any project I’ve ever worked on because it’s such a tight site,” Campbell says. “The solutions we came up with as far as the public spaces and support spaces in the middle of the building and the second-floor emergency department were really driven by that, as well as some collocation needs. There are spaces located in the middle floors that would normally be found in the basement, for instance. Those choices, in turn, really influenced the outside of the building and pushed it in certain directions. The building evolved from the inside out.”

The design for the procedural floors presented its own set of unique challenges.

“It was clear very early on in planning that placing all of the operating rooms and interventional rooms, and their recovery spaces on a single floor plate was not viable,” says Bob Schaefer, vice president and senior project architect with Anderson Mikos Architects, the design lead for the procedural floors. “Even with splitting the programs across the fifth, sixth, and seventh floors, there were still large floor plates that created challenges in trying to reduce horizontal distances from pre-op to surgery, from surgery to recovery, and to patient and material elevators.

“Ultimately, the procedural floors were organized around a central clean supply core,” Schaefer continues. “This allowed for a consistent layout for proper placement of clean and soiled elevators to the sterile reprocessing area on the ninth floor above, as well as the patient flow to and from the pre-op, first stage and second stage recovery areas, and elevators on each procedural floor. Each of the three procedural floors was arranged with soft space to the east that could be used for expansion of both procedural and pre- and post-op spaces. The need for staff to quickly communicate between each of the three procedural floors without leaving the semirestricted areas was solved by creating a clean stair within the same opening as one of the exit stairs, but as a physically and fire-separated ‘scissor stair’ connecting floors five, six, and seven within the semirestricted areas.”

The new building is also connected via bridges to the neighboring Prentice Women’s Hospital as well as a parking structure. Visitors with non-emergencies are therefore given the option of a ground-level drop-off or entry from the second-level bridge off the parking structure.

Ground-floor visitors can ride elevators from the lobby or take the “diving bell” elevator to the second floor, where they’ll access the public elevators between the second and 11th floors. A second set of elevators serves floors 11 and above, for added security.