World Class Pediatric Care, Closer to Home
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Eastgate Campus
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Cincinnati, OH | 110,000 SF
Daylight filled spaces create a light, bright feel. An open floor plan helps people easily see their destination and intuitively navigate there. Placing waiting areas adjacent to the central stair also encourages movement.
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center is dedicated to improving children’s health. Their new Eastgate medical office building will bring their world-class care closer to home for people in rural communities with limited access to specialty pediatric services. This new location prioritizes collaborative care in a facility that feels distinctly Cincinnati Children’s while also responding to its suburban environment. This includes positioning the building to be easily seen by vehicles along the adjacent interstate.
We worked with Cincinnati Children’s to craft an ambulatory design strategy that can grow with them as they expand into more suburban and rural locations. The strategy includes a new exterior expression for neighborhood facilities as well as using textures and colors that feel playful and appropriate for patients ranging in age from newborns to young adults.
Earthy and familiar, the brick exterior evokes a sense of warmth and welcome. It also creates a sense of connection between this new building and Cincinnati Children's main campus buildings. Glass and color concentrated at the entrance make it clear where to go and help invite people inside.
The outpatient approach considers sustainable future growth. Its orientation allows the building’s largest glass façade to face toward the west and northeast, capturing daylight while reducing heat gain. Building fins on the exterior also provide intermittent shading and help reduce glare. These moves, along with optimizing insulation thicknesses, and conservation measures in the HVAC design, have helped achieve a predicted Energy Use Intensity (pEUI) of 68 Btu/sf per year— a 49% reduction in energy use.
Using a prefabricated panelized system on the exterior facade is helping speed the project to market. By saving time and money here, Cincinnati Children's was able to use more of their budget on clinics, making them as impactful as possible for patients and providers.
The facade design concentrates textural brick patterns around key moments to celebrate arrival. The design team worked closely with masons and the construction team to craft a distinctive yet cost-effective pattern.
Understanding how children learn through play informed the building’s design. Several integrated interior elements combine to create an experience that feels supportive, uplifting, and caring—all hallmarks of Cincinnati Children’s. Soft, rounded edges; the interplay of light and shadow; and opportunities for physical movement—whether around the building’s central stair or along outdoor walking paths that connect to additional paths in the development—invite discovery. An interactive celestial themed ceiling embedded with QR codes will take users to books and stories.
The optimized central core acts as a hub, minimizing travel distances for patients and staff.
Organized around a central hub designed for intuitive navigation, the layout minimizes travel distances to different services. Clinical programs arrayed around this hub include outpatient surgery, labs, imaging, behavioral health, urgent care, flex clinics for multidiscipline specialties, as well as sports medicine, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech, audiology, and ophthalmology. These and other services are co-located based on optimal adjacencies for logistics, security, safety, and shared space opportunities.
As academic medical centers reach deeper into communities with their specialty services, it is critical to maintain brand consistency and quality across locations. This project is a model for taking an integrated, strategic approach to design that will positively impact future facilities.
Behind the central stair, built in seating with whimsical touches and views out support a sense of play and discovery.
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