A healthcare environment with the technologic backbone to support innovative treatments and the ability to attract top medical staff in life-enhancing environments for patients, family, and staff was created for Arizona’s largest hospital. The three-story expansion and renovation project accommodates outpatient services and brings forward three Centers of Excellence—Women’s Health, Imaging, and a Comprehensive Cardiovascular Center. These consolidated, formerly dispersed care areas are now easily accessible from the new main lobby or from the new parking garage, with floors clearly aligned with each of the departments.

The separation of clinical cart traffic from public/visitor circulation is a critical change from the existing hospital. Adopted to enhance the comfort and dignity of patients and visitors, the separation was pivotal to achieving the desired environment, allowing a relationship between wayfinding and several new gardens that have been added since the hospital’s first garden in the 1990s. A therapeutically significant garden is outside the new infusion suite. Patients undergoing infusion experience natural light and the outdoors in their dedicated garden with a water feature and overhead screening.

A new interior color and material palette is based on the native Arizona desert. These interior standards bring continuity to the entire expansion project and were used in the renovation of infill projects and the existing inpatient tower.

The glass walls at the entry mitigate and lighten the foreboding, existing hospital structure. The addition wraps around the hospital’s existing austere eastern elevation to create a welcoming, contemporary image to the community.

Project category: New construction & Remodel/Renovation (completed September 2004)

Chief administrator: Paul Mullings, FACHE, Chief Executive Officer, (602) 239-2716

Firm: OWP/P, (312) 960-8078

Design team: Deborah Sheehan, Project Director; Tara McCay, AIA, Project Manager; David Kuffner, AIA, Planner; Steven Yanke, PE, Project Engineer

Photography: Bill Timmerman

Total building area (sq. ft.): 342,000 (new); 39,700 (renovation)

Construction cost/sq. ft.: $96 (new); $295 (renovation)

Total construction cost (excluding land): $32,750,000 (new); $11,702,000 (renovation)