Project category: Project in progress (May 2006)

Chief administrator: Bruce Campbell, President, (847) 723-8446

Firm: OWP/P, (312) 960-8078

Design team: Greg Heiser, AIA, Project Principal; Randy Guillot, AIA, Design Principal; Troy Hoggard, Project Designer (OWP/P); Gerry Noorts, PE, Project Manager, Mechanical and Plumbing Engineering (Grumman/Butkus Associates); Roger S. Allen, Executive Vice-President, Electrical Engineering (Dickerson Engineering, Inc.)

Total building area (sq. ft.): 54,350 (new); 40,775 (renovation)

Construction cost/sq. ft.: $262 (total)

Total construction cost (excluding land): $24,955,000 (total)


Demand for cancer and imaging services exceeded capacity in facilities scattered throughout the hospital’s campus. In response, the Cancer Center is now an outpatient facility featuring a multidisciplinary cancer institute and an imaging center on the first two floors, and a third floor dedicated to women’s breast health, offering screening, diagnostics, treatment, and counseling. Each floor connects to a parking structure for patients and visitors.

Patients requiring imaging services will no longer wait as long as 42 days for screening and diagnostic mammograms, biopsies, and surgical consultations. Through the addition and gut renovation, the building supports multidisciplinary continuity of care and is convenient for patients, family, and staff in an uplifting environment commensurate with its consistent ranking among the top 50 cancer-care programs in the country.

It is an important edge building on campus. Its shape enhances its visibility to the community and enables independent identity and entries for each major program component. Pulling the components apart reveals spaces that become entries, common space, and outdoor space, all linked by a semitransparent communal perimeter. Ten-foot floor-to-floor height in the existing building dictated using a circulation strategy to build a sense of a “center” that provides interrelated services. All space, including circulation, is programmed space. In the original building there was no such community fabric or connection to light or air. Now, circulation, the atrium, and semipublic areas function for waiting, congregating, and registration related to the clinical spaces to which they adjoin.