Projects

Opened in fall 2013, Mercy Health - West Hospital brings a new level of healthcare to Cincinnati's west side. The 625,000sf project features 250 beds, comprehensive cardiac care, an oncology treatment center, a maternity and birthing center, and Ohio's largest green roof. The medical facility eliminates the need for the local residents to travel outside of the area for full-service medical care.

The medical facility features state-of-the-art care combined with amenities that focus on the patient and their families to create a comfortable and healing atmosphere. This approach to health care architecture, balancing beauty, culture and function set a new standard for hospital design. Connections between architecture, natural light, and landscape promote healing.

Located on a 60-acre wooded site, the hospital's large diagnostic and treatment base is designed to co-locate surgery, imaging, the emergency department, and cardiovascular ICU. Two-bed towers sit on this platform, which features a living roof covered with native plants — providing an ever-changing view from the patient rooms above.

The unique, 107,000sf green roof covers 2.5 acres and has more than 65,000 plants. Patients and visitors can enjoy views of the roof from the patient towers, as well as an observation area. The roof helps maintain cooler building temperatures during summer months, while capturing and holding 75% of rainwater, thus lessening the amount of stormwater run-off.

In 2012, the Christ Hospital Network in Cincinnati, Ohio, decided to add an orthopedic center of excellence to its already nationally renowned healthcare facility. The owners worked with an architect to design the seven-story, 381,000 ft2 LEED Silver-certified Joint & Spine Center, which linked it directly to the hospital’s existing surgical and imaging areas.

As part of the broader master plan, the client and architect agreed that the design for the Joint & Spine Center needed to reflect the historical redbrick vernacular of the other campus buildings. It also had to meet strict budget restrictions, deliver a watertight building envelope, and meet the high-performance goals set for the new building. All of these requirements would be met with a precast concrete design.

2019 PCI Award Winner

As the use of a structure changes over time, the facilities themselves must adapt. Sometimes, this means fully demolishing an existing structure to accommodate the evolving needs of its tenants. This was the case at a regional medical center, where plans were made to replace a parking garage to increase capacity and functionality. The project would feature six levels and a total of 851 parking spaces along with the construction of medical offices within the new structure. The medical center also wanted to design their new garage with flat levels so patients with mobility issues could easily access the main buildings without having to navigate ramps or stairs. It was crucial to avoid disruption of hospital access for employees and patients during construction. The bulk of this project also happened to take place during the peak of a pandemic, meaning that the hospital had higher traffic and that it was even more important to minimize disruption of the medical center’s activity.

2023 PCI Design Award Winner

Pulling in the beauty of what the sun can do to a building, the designers captured the memorizing angles consistently throughout the self-cleaning, TX Active white cement mix. The primary design objective was to create a signature architectural building using precast while maintaining a strickt budget. This 10-story 36,735 square foot precast facade was designed with folded triangle faceted insulated wall panels, angled decorative fins, and a deceptive fold from top to bottom of this building. Two of the full precast sides of the building assimilate two large triangles meeting together on one of the three sides. At the seam where those sides meet, the panels either cascade in or out depending on the side you are viewing. The angled decorative fins sit vertically along the outside of windows. These three-dimensional fins rotate the angular peeks from one vertical row to the next. Building the illusion of depth and complexity on the building, this eye-catching feature cannot go unnoticed. Energy efficient faceted wall panels might seem to take a back seat in this beautiful design. With the details in depth created with the folded triangular pattern along these narrow wall panels your eye goes directly to them. This building, built with LEED silver certification contingency, was designed to withstand the future 10 floor addition. A mirrored image of the building standing now will be placed above the existing structure.

The Riverside Hospital Neuroscience Tower project is a 10-story, 437,000-square-foot addition to an Ohio Health campus. The project is the only one of its kind and is a state-of-the-art, world-class brain and spine care destination. The project includes 224 private rooms and a large interior atrium the size of two full-size basketball courts.

The exterior features 72,390 ft2 white, precast concrete panels as well as a series of blue-tinted, vertical windows. This was done to resemble the other buildings on the campus. These buildings were built at different times, with different materials, but many feature white brick walls surrounding vertical rhythms of windows. “We wanted to stay away from bricks,” said the architect. “They have an institutional connotation and can make a building appear bigger.”

Precast panels were utilized on the exterior of the building to cover a substantial portion of the facade. Precast was also used to clad a large portion of an interior courtyard that began at the third level of the structure with a rooftop green space/garden area and concluded seven stories higher at the penthouse level.

The UPMC York health campus is home to three precast concrete enclosed buildings.  These buildings have very similar qualities to each other but stand alone. Each building has the same color scheme using a light color with a sandblasted finish and a dark charcoal color with a duxberry formliner. 

The hospital contains more individualized rooms where each window is framed with a unique precast portion that protrudes out. The elevation around the windowsill grows from a flat side to about a 3-inch elevation on the other side. This creates beautiful shadows framing the windows themselves. 

The surgery and cancer center is more of a full-floor unit. You can identify this portion by the picture frame windows that span the whole floor. These windows also have projections, but they run from top to bottom compared to the hospital windows that run left to right. 

The last building on the campus is the central utility plant. This building is home to all the HVAC and generators to support the other two buildings. With the exposed roof and design of the hospital and the surgery and cancer building, they did not want to house these items on the roof of the buildings. As a result, the facility nearby houses all that is needed to help maintaine the other two buildings.