The new 11-story, 820,000-square-foot Cedars-Sinai Advanced Health Sciences Pavilion, which opened in June 2013, combines patient care, clinical offices, physician education, and training and research in a single building. The facility was designed by HOK.

A key strategic objective was to create research facilities that would attract exceptional faculty members—doctors who provide clinical services, teach, and do translational research. The architecture of the pavilion supports the complex program that includes laboratories, clinical, training, and collaboration spaces. Cedars-Sinai also saw the building as an opportunity to evolve their institutional structure to accelerate scientific discoveries. In response, HOK designed flexibility at all levels—structural grid, building, and systems level—to support a highly integrated clinical model.

A universal module was developed to flex to support all functions, from research labs to clinical space, and even the parking levels. The expandable 60-square-foot module units provide an efficient, flexible platform for stacking.

Most of the necessary outpatient services are organized on a single floor: intake, imaging, and the pharmacy. The light-filled environment is designed to be easy to navigate.

A further challenge to the design was the site itself. Among the last parcels on Cedar-Sinai’s dense, 24-acre urban medical campus, the site, both prominent and constrained, had to serve as gateway to the campus, as an outpatient facility and as a first-tier research facility. The glass façades are part of the sustainable strategy that earned the facility a LEED Gold designation.