Sustainable design provides clean and efficient environments that promote healing: attributes that are nowhere more important than at a pediatric hospital. Recognizing this, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh is working with the architectural firm Astorino to achieve a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified design that is sensitive to the environment and will contribute to the overall welfare of the patients, family and community it serves, now and in the future.

site: responsible, accessible, considerate

The new UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh is under construction on the urban campus of a former hospital in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of the city. By opting to locate the new hospital on this existing campus, the hospital will benefit from many of the assets already in place while the increased economic activity it will generate will help to revitalize the immediate urban neighborhood.

The campus sits on multiple transportation routes, allowing ease of access for commuting families, visitors, physicians and staff. All on-site parking was structured to maximize the density of the site and to reduce heat island effects otherwise caused by exposed pavement. A short-term parking garage located below the Clinical Service Building’s front plaza will serve outpatient functions. Longer-term inpatient parking, as well as physician and employee parking, are conveniently located in additional structures on-site. Bicycle racks, showers and lockers will be available to all staff as another option for commuters.

Finally, the site design is considerate to the needs of the city and the neighborhood. Considerable green spaces are planned on and around the building, featuring plantings selected to minimize irrigation needs. The campus and building lighting design will avoid light spill and direct-beam illumination off of the property, an important consideration for an institution situated directly across the street from a residential neighborhood. Finally, the roof surfaces will be either planted plazas or coated with a highly reflective membrane to minimize the urban heat island effect that would be generated by the nearly four-acre roof.

systems: effective, measurable, clean

The new UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh is under construction on the urban campus of a former hospital in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of the city.

The project team has taken advantage of overlaps between LEED priorities and healthcare requirements to design a high-quality, efficient, and controllable set of MEP systems for the facility. Creation of a campus-wide Central Plant will help to reduce overall energy consumption at the source level and avoid the need for CFC and HCFC refrigerants. In order to ensure the performance of the systems, a construction air quality plan will be followed, an additional building air flush and filter change will be performed, and a commissioning process has been specified to ensure that all systems perform appropriately from day one.

This commissioning process designates an Information Systems (IS) contractor who will be responsible for the installation of all low-voltage, network driven systems (including building automation, telecommunication, structured cabling, network, fire alarm, security, etc.). The IS contractor will be responsible for the test start and balance of all MEP systems, and will provide and manage the test engineer responsibilities for functional performance testing (commissioning).

“Our approach shifts performance responsibility to the purveyors of the technology, which gives them a stake in the success of the project and thereby helps to ensure overall project success while potentially reducing project costs,” says Patrick Branch, COO of Astorino.

A measurement and verification plan is also in place to allow the hospital to track performance over time, and maintain the efficiency of the building into the future.

materials: healthy, durable, reusable

All building materials have been considered for both the broad environmental impacts and specific impacts that they will have on the project. More than 25 percent of the building area, including certain clinical areas, will be within the reused structure from the previous hospital. Significant amounts of recycled materials will be used beginning with the structural steel, which is nearly 100 percent recycled content. Brick and other exterior and interior finishes selections were made based on local extraction and availability.

Durability, cleanability and the overall quality of the interior environment are also major considerations. The hospital was particularly interested in selecting finishes, adhesives and sealants to reduce volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions into the space, including green label carpets and low-VOC paints and adhesives. Finally, mercury in the building will be reduced through the specification of HVAC system switches, the careful selection of lamp technologies for reduced mercury content, and the review of new medical equipment.

innovation: integrated, natural, deep design

The Healing Garden provides patients and their families with the opportunity to directly experience the natural world without leaving the safety of the hospital environment.

Building a new structure has provided the design team with numerous opportunities to engage innovative solutions to design problems. In addressing the challenge of designing, coordinating, and commissioning the ever growing number of low-voltage and data systems within a hospital, Astorino is combining these systems and conceiving them as a single network. The results include reduction in redundant wiring, simplifying testing and verification, and allowing for future additions and redundancies to be more easily implemented. In conjunction with this system there will be a DALI (Digital Addressable Lighting Interface) lamp life monitoring system and a lighting control system with daylight harvesting to minimize wasteful energy use, and ensure that lamps in all fixtures are kept operating at their prime level.

Despite the dense urban site location, design elements ensure that both patients and staff have a connection to the natural world. Of particular note is the Healing Garden, which provides patients and their families with the opportunity to directly experience the natural world without leaving the safety of the hospital environment. This outdoor space is an extension of an adjoining four-story inpatient atrium, and ties all of the bedroom levels together, both physically and visually. For patients who are well enough to go outside, the garden provides lush, vegetated settings for activities and play, meditation and healing, and other positive distractions from the hospital setting.

Astorino is using its unique design process to ensure that insights uncovered during individual interviews with patients, parents and staff were translated into design elements that truly responded to the users’ needs. The process incorporates a groundbreaking research technique, never before used in architecture, to elicit the deepest thoughts and feelings of all user groups.

“By combining and translating the thoughts and feelings of patients and families, the workflow and insights of medical staff, and the cost control concerns of the administration, Astorino created a meaningful design that will truly meets the needs of the users,” says Dennis Astorino, CEO of Astorino.

Astorino’s design for the new Replacement Facility embodies the Hospital’s desire to provide a quality facility that will reinforce the strong reputation of Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. The end product will provide an environment designed to promote healing, and where the dedicated staff will have the requisite tools to deliver state-of-the-art medical care to patients and their families for generations to come.

children’s hospital of Pittsburgh, clinical services building

gross area: 1.4 million
number of beds: 265
project cost: $555 million
scheduled for completion: 2008

project team
architect, interior designer, commissioning, leed consultant, lighting design, landscape architecture and structural: astorino
medical equipment consultant: gene burton & assoc. (gb&a)
elevator, materials and waste management consultant: lerch, bates & associates, inc.
dining/kitchen: h-mak inc. (dining/servery), curran taylor inc. (kitchen)
site/civil: kag engineering
signage: thoughtform