Paxson Fay

Collaboration and care drive design of new UW health sciences building

Photos by Moris Moreno

The building has a unique textural and reflective skin which creates an imposing new entrance to the South Campus of UW Seattle.

Last October, after 39 months of construction, the University of Washington opened a new 97,000-square-foot Health Sciences Education Building at 1607 N.E. Pacific St. on the south end of the university’s Seattle campus.

The four-story facility is the first project to be completed under UW’s 2018 Campus Master Plan and is the marquee new building for a reimagined South Campus, which is set to become a center for health and medical research.

The inter-professional education building is home to educational and social spaces for six disciplines under the health sciences umbrella and aims to be a trend-setting space for collaboration between students and the broader health professional community.

The building was delivered by the design-build team of architects Miller Hull and Connecticut-based SLAM Collaborative, and general contractor Lease Crutcher Lewis. It cost $77.4 million.

The project team has created a state-of-the-art facility designed to foster interaction, collaboration, and creativity with a diverse mix of shared and discipline specific learning spaces and several shared common areas. The building is also conceived as an embodiment of care and is designed to reflect that core value and goal of medical research and service. This is expressed in myriad ways which include the addition of wellness specific spaces, access to daylight and the outside, and biophilic elements such as exposed CLT ceilings.

The facility has a mix of learning and communal environments, including labs …

The new facility has flexible student spaces, staff/faculty offices, and a broad array of learning environments. These include a large anatomy laboratory, a day-lit library, classrooms, skills laboratories, informal learning areas and breakout spaces, all kitted out with the most advanced technology. Each classroom has opportunities for lecture capture, remote participation, live connection with other learning spaces in the city and region, and training technologies for future healthcare professionals to deliver accessible healthcare via virtual appointments.

Learning and lab spaces are intermixed with more informal areas to encourage social connections between students and faculty in different disciplines, holistic learning, and student wellness. Describing the building’s layout, Miller Hull said it “strikes a careful balance between scheduled classrooms and student collaboration zones, providing generously sized spaces for groupwork, interaction, and creativity to allow students to learn from, with, and about each other.”

… and a student lounge area/kitchen.

At the heart of the building is an inter-professional commons, perched over a pocket park and future water view corridor. The building also has a large inter-professional skills lab suite, where students from all health sciences can learn in large or small groups to focus on a particular skill.

“For years, campus buildings have been constructed around a discipline or department, leading to programs being siloed and respective buildings seen as their turf,” Elizabeth Moggio, project manager and principal at Miller Hull, shared in a press release. “Our approach lends itself to the optimization of resources and offers space for six disciplines to be co-located in the same building. The design is highly flexible, supporting future resiliency. If programs grow or shrink, no space will go unused because they are designed for change and with an eye towards universality,” she continued.

Miller Hull says a “culture of care” guided the design of the project’s site, architecture, and interior experience as the team “envisioned an environment that supports the health and well-being of its residents and visitors.” This equates to a structure and environment that looks and feels intentionally opposite to the sterile, hospital-like spaces often found in university medical buildings. The Health Sciences Education Building is constructed with warm, healthy materials to promote a sense of connection to nature and help students feel at ease in a high-pressure atmosphere. It has a hybrid structure of steel, concrete, and CLT in its roof and floor assemblies. That CLT is exposed on interior ceilings to bring warmth and nature into the space.

Nature is also brought into the space via the careful placement of windows and the thoughtful blending of indoor and outdoor areas. Existing buildings on the South Campus have an entirely interior path for students and faculty to travel from one building to another without going outside. The design for this building transforms that experience by pulling people outdoors, introducing a network of accessible pathways, mural and sculptural public art, and outdoor seating to provide students and faculty with places to pause and collaborate outside, and experience grounding moments in nature.

The culture of care embodied in this building and project also extends to its environmental impact. The design-build team incorporated emerging and impactful sustainable technologies including the development of a regional stormwater infrastructure that serves the building and will serve other facilities at the South Campus, electrochromic glazing, and the hybrid CLT structure.

“Rather than develop a solution within the constrained project boundary, the regional green stormwater solution offers a way to provide day to day water treatment for 34 acres of south campus that feed into a single watershed,” Moggio explained in the release.

Miller Hull adds that the inclusion of CLT enabled the university to reduce the embodied carbon impact of the building’s structural decking system by 50% and support the ecology of the region and the state by helping to responsibly manage and protect natural resources and mitigate wildfire risks.

The project team for the UW Health Sciences Education Building also includes; GGN, landscape architect; KPFF Consulting Engineers, civil and structural engineer; Studio Pacifica, accessibility: 4EA, envelope; Mayer/Reed, sinage; Tenor Engineering Group, acoustics; The Greenbusch Group, vertical transportation; Coffman Engineers, fire protection; and CPP, Air Modeling/Air Quality.