MCMs IN ACTION: CASE STUDY #1

Photo courtesy of 3A Composites USA

TOWER HOSPITAL AT RUSH UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER, CHICAGO

Project: Tower Hospital at Rush University Medical Center
Location: Chicago
Architect: Perkins+Will
Contractor: Powers/Jacob Joint Venture
Metal Installer: ASI
MCA/MCM Alliance Member Manufacturer: 3A Composites USA
MCA/MCM Alliance Member Fabricator: Sobotec
Completion: January 2012

Chicago is renowned for its skyscraper skyline, and the city’s new Tower Hospital at Rush University Medical Center stands among the best. More than just a pretty building, its design was driven by and for its occupants—the doctors, nurses, staff, and patients who use it.

The 840,000-square-foot, LEED Gold certified Tower Hospital is the main bed tower on the Rush University Medical Center campus. The unique butterfly-shaped design is awe-inspiring from the exterior, but the design serves an important purpose as well. The floor plan, essentially a triangle, brings the patient rooms closer together, a specific concern for the nurses seeking more efficient access to patients.

“We used an inside-out approach to design Tower Hospital,” says John Moorhead, senior project designer at Perkins+Will, the Chicago-based architects who designed the building.

The architects collaborated with Rush staff to find out how they worked and designed the shape of the building to fit their operational model. “We let that impact what the design needed to be,” Moorhead explains. “The nurses talked about the number of miles they walk per shift. They were particularly interested in creating a plan that pushed together the patient rooms.”

Once the butterfly shape was conceptualized, the challenge became how to make it fly: functionally, aesthetically, and monetarily. An ACM provided the solution. About 250,000 square feet of MCM in a custom color was installed as exterior wall cladding on the Tower Hospital.

“Metal provided flexibility and affordability,” Moorhead says. “It was the perfect choice to give the crisp white look that Rush was interested in, and it was easily adaptable to the curvilinear shape of the building.”

At one point in the planning, the idea of the butterfly shape was nearly scrapped for a more standard rectangular shape to stay within budget, but the Rush team was determined to achieve its vision.

“The dramatic curvilinear shape was driven by the clinical team and our inside-out approach,” Moorhead says. “The doctors and nurses really liked the operational flow of this plan. The question then became: How do we clad it within the budget allowance?”

The ACM used to clad the tower helped Rush realize both of those goals. “MCM is durable, does not warp, and can be bent into any shape,” says Ben Branham, architectural marketing manager at 3A Composites USA. “The Rush Tower has a lot of bends and curves. MCM provided the vehicle for architects to do that.”

Sobotec in Hamilton, Ontario, the metal fabricator on the project, designed a unitized curtain-wall system to enclose the tower as quickly as possible. Sobotec created AutoCAD computer-generated drawings to fabricate MCM panels. ASI, in charge of the installation, then fit the panels into the prefabricated curtain wall with a framed support system for the metal panels and glass.

The campus has a number of metal buildings, so an ACM-clad tower made sense in that respect as well. Choosing white as its color also was purposeful. “Whenever the color of a building is white, people assume they did not look at color, but we looked at color extensively,” Moorhead says. “They [Rush] really wanted to project an image of fresh, clean, modern, and technically savvy. It is very crisp white, part of the image they wanted to project.” Rush also wanted to avoid the recent trend in hospital design, which is to make hospitals look more like hotels.

Rush University and the City of Chicago praise the new Tower Hospital. The project has won numerous awards and accolades, including Engineering News-Record Midwest’s Project of the Year (2012) and the 2013 MCA Chairman’s Award in the Institutional Project category. KPMG named the Rush Tower “one of the most innovative and inspiring urban architecture projects in the world.” The Chicago Tribune architectural critic Blair Kamin called it a “towering achievement, the new Rush hospital could be Chicago’s next great building.”

Tower Hospital’s architectural and operational goals were achieved largely because of metal. “While our foremost goal was for the new hospital’s design to support its function and enhance patient care, we also knew it would be very important to establish a strong visual presence in Chicago’s skyline and along the expressway leading to and from the city,” says Mike Lamont, associate vice president, Capital Projects, Rush University Medical Center.