Case Study:
Center For Health And Healing

A Healthy Dose of Green: A University's Medical Office Building Achieves Leed Platinum through Some Serious Integrated Design Strategies.

By Randy Gragg

At the first meeting with the architects designing the Oregon Health and Science University’s Center for Health and Healing, developer Dennis Wilde posed a challenge: Reduce the capital costs for the building’s mechanical systems by 25 percent but make it outperform the Oregon energy code by 60 percent.

For a simple, single-use building, Wilde’s goal would have been bold enough. But given the center’s unprecedented mix of swimming pools, a surgery suite, exam rooms, offices, and research labs—each with heating, cooling, and ventilation demands far beyond the norm—it was nothing short of audacious. “It was impetuousness, plain and simple,” recalls Wilde, a principal at Gerding Edlen. “We habitually build buildings full of mechanical equipment that’s seldom used. Why the hell not get creative?” What the team quickly discovered is that the proverbial sum, in fact, could be much greater than the parts, particularly if you make sure most of those parts serve more than one function.

Designed by GBD Architects in close collaboration with Interface Engineering, the Center for Health and Healing is a lesson in the architecture of integration. “The more we started really looking at the systems, the more we were able to cut costs,” says GBD’s lead designer, Kyle Andersen, AIA. “It was about reducing the equipment or rethinking it to do multiple things, instead of just looking through the tables and picking what’s always worked in the past.”

Yet, the design of the $145-million, 400,000-square-foot center needed to do far more than save energy as the first building in the university’s new 10-acre satellite campus and one of the first in Portland’s largest urban redevelopment in 40 years: the 38-acre, $1.9-billion River Blocks development. It would rise 16 stories next to a new streetcar line to downtown and a stylish new aerial tram linking the district to the university’s main hilltop campus, a 3,000-foot flight away. Housing the district’s first health club and all of the university hospital’s outpatient services, the center would be a gateway building that officials wanted to stand as an “icon of health.”

But the steepest challenge, according to Andersen, was the complex stack of uses inside the building: wellness, fitness, and physical therapy facilities, plus a conference center on the lower floors; outpatient clinics, imaging, and ambulatory surgery on the middle floors; and offices and laboratories on top. With no major foundation or government grants or private benefactor, the university doctors’ group was developing the center, in effect, as a “spec med science facility” with Gerding/Edlen as the turnkey developer. As pro forma driven as any spec office building, every use inside had to pay its own way based on either future expected fees or rents.

With 55 LEED points, it’s the largest health-care facility in the country so far to earn a Platinum rating.

The resulting tower stands with pragmatic simplicity: a stack of programs rising between stair towers with a three-story glass-box atrium lobby fronting the busy aerial tram station. With the center’s near-perfect compass orientation, computational fluid dynamic modeling showed the building could be ventilated almost entirely through passive means. The north side features a ventilation system that draws air through the building, its circulation given a boost by the heat of lights and computers. The stair towers at the building’s east and west ends both reduce the building’s solar loads while functioning as stacks to further draw air out.

The team’s constant search for “double duties” in the design is most clearly visible in the south elevation—what Anderson calls the “machine side”—which rises in a unitized curtain wall fitted with sunshades, each equipped with photovoltaic panels that add up to 60 kilowatts of power. The sunshades alone reduced the building’s cooling loads by 30 tons, enough, according to Andersen, to pay for the brackets used to mount them.

Daylighting studies the team conducted to determine the sunshades’ size and placement revealed another opportunity: the south side’s sun-baked upper floors were perfect for a solar collector. Hence, Andersen stepped the top of the building back five feet for a greenhouse-like space clad in low-iron glass behind which the 100-degree-plus sunny-day temperatures preheat water circulated to the labs, swimming pools, and the lobby and waiting area’s radiant floors. The collector is projected to provide about one percent of the building’s overall energy, which, according to Andersen, will lead to a capital cost payback period of only nine years. “This building spends a lot of energy heating up water,” Andersen notes. “We looked for any way we could do it cheaply or with a quick payback.” Even the five natural-gas-fired microturbines, designed to produce 30 percent of the building’s energy, provide excess heat used to warm the swimming pool.

The team’s efforts to curb water usage and disposal grew as ambitious as Wilde’s energy goals. Green roofs and an on-site bioreactor were designed to process every drop of rainwater, groundwater seepage, and sewage on site,  to then be reused for landscape irrigation, toilet flushing, or radiant cooling, as well as to charge a bioswale that seeps into the nearby Willamette River. Overall, the building’s resource-use modeling proposed a possible 68 percent savings in water usage, or about 2.1 million gallons annually. For all their concentration on integrating the building’s systems, Andersen and his team designed an unusually comfortable and inspired space. The Center’s most dramatic feature is the atrium. Here, energy and cost savings served aesthetics since the underground parking garage’s ventilation system also exhausts the atrium in the event of a fire, leaving the ceiling free of bulky fans. With all the clinical and surgery waiting rooms located on the building’s north side—and all air-conditioned with radiant floors and chilled beams—the center’s main lobby and waiting areas are unimaginably quiet and calm for a major medical clinic. Gracious north windows flash views of the fitness equipment and basketball courts to passing aerial tram and streetcar riders.

Sadly, the building lost what might have been its most iconic features: cowels to more powerfully vent the stair towers and wind turbines to provide electricity. The building’s doctor/investors were willing to shoulder the 30-year payback period, Andersen recalls, but the Portland Design Commission voted down the necessary height variance.

So how well has the center measured up to Wilde’s challenge? Wilde says the building’s systems were “cost-neutral with no savings, but no huge premium.” Interface’s lead engineer, Andy Frichtl, PE, argues the goals were met, if you calculate the internal rates of return on capital paybacks due to energy saved over the building’s life. The energy modeling shows the center should operate at 61 percent below energy code. One thing is for sure: with 55 LEED points, the Center became the largest health-care facility in the country so far to earn a Platinum rating.

But commissioning the center has proven complex, taking over 10 months, according to chief building engineer Mark Schnackenberg. The optimistic models, he notes, were based on more typical, 9-to-5 building usage, not on laboratories in which a researcher might want to work all night with the building’s systems pumping 16 hourly changes of air into a lab. The newly-planted green roofs and landscapes have demanded more water than anticipated, Schnackenberg says, leaving the building’s cistern too empty at times to flush the toilets. That triggered the back-up system along with the 17-cents-per-gallon penalty the city demanded for the accelerated permitting of a previously untried system—about $250,000/year—according to Schnackenberg. The bioreactor had to be upsized to handle the surprising large clinical and laboratory loads and has frequently broken down due to rags and other debris tossed in by busy technicians failing to follow disposal rules. “In retrospect,” Schnackenberg says, “a bioreactor probably wasn’t the right fit for this kind of facility.”

Engineer Frichtl relishes the “software-like” complexity of the systems. Developer Wilde longs for the simplicity achieved with the solar collector—but throughout the building’s other systems, too. The center, he contends, is overly complex, when the future design of more sustainable buildings should aim “to be smarter and simpler.” But the center’s operating engineer, Schnackenberg, wants to wait and see before judging. He says the center has yet to hit any of the projected efficiencies. “But it will take a full year of operating fully commissioned every season to really know,” he adds. “This is uncharted territory. We’re really just starting.”

del.icio.us