Download printable project sheet, 180KB.The US Army Corps of Engineers retained Sherlock, Smith & Adams, along with the DLR Group of Omaha, Nebraska, to provide complete architectural and engineering services for the Madigan Army Regional Tertiary Care and Teaching Hospital, located in Ft. Lewis, Washington. This 1,227,427-square-foot medical center was designed and programmed for a 100-year life.
The building's footprint covers almost 360,000 SF—more than eight acres. The design concept divides healthcare services into four functional areas in a multi-building cluster. The nine-story nursing tower houses inpatient care; the four-story medical ancillary building houses hospital functions; the three-story medical mall houses an outpatient clinic; and a single-story building houses energy and logistics support.
The close proximity of the building elements facilitates patient and staff circulation and material transportation. The campus style site plan provides more human-scale building relationships than would be available in a single-building scheme. The modulated ground plane around Madigan nestles the medical center into the earth, providing multi-level entrances and reducing internal elevator traffic.
Separating traffic to each functional area involved major reconfiguration of the adjacent arterial highway and the addition of a perimeter campus beltway.
Wells provide condenser water for the air conditioning system. Discharged water runs in a stream between the ancillary building and outpatient clinic into a four-acre landscaped lake and then percolates back into the underground aquifer. The lake accepts storm water drainage and provides water for landscape irrigation. A walkway winds around the perimeter.
Interstitial spaces house mechanical, electrical and communication distribution systems. Over five feet of clear space is provided under the structure to allow maintenance personnel to stand upright. The interstitial decks significantly reduced construction costs in two ways: 1) They made system installation easier, and 2) they provided seismic support for all partitions, ceilings, piping systems, electrical systems and lighting fixtures, without elaborate diagonal bracing.