Project category: New construction (completed May 2004)

Chief administrator: Bill Syler, Vice-President, Facilities and Real Estate, (417) 820-2934

Firm: Christner, Inc., (314) 725-2927

Design team: John Reeve, Principal-in-Charge; Wayne Mandel, Project Manager; Amy Angell, Interior Designer; Laurel Harrington, Landscape Architect; Warren Hauff, Planner/Programmer; Cindy Siepel, Planner/Programmer

Photography: ©2004 Sam Fentress

Total building area (sq. ft.): 250,000

Construction cost/sq. ft.: $100

Total construction cost (excluding land): $25,000,000

This large regional hospital’s main surgery was operating beyond capacity, with projections for increasing pressure on services. An intensive and comprehensive, system-wide, strategic facility-planning process led to the proposal of a new five-story, 200,000-sq.-ft. building with a 25,000-sq.-ft. ambulatory surgery center (ASC) on a 10-acre tract on the campus’s northeast corner, to improve operational efficiency and to make space available for future inpatient surgery growth at the current main surgery location. To limit the size of the building, only specific high-volume clinical services—including orthopedics, plastic surgery, ophthalmology, and oral surgery, which typically do not need access to the main surgery for routine outpatient procedures—were chosen to move to the ASC.

The ground-floor ASC accommodates eight outpatient operating rooms (two ophthalmology, four orthopedics, two general), six of which are equipped with integrated technology. Physicians and staff use a dedicated elevator. A small, fully digital imaging center on the second floor includes an MRI. The ground floor also includes an optical shop and a small coffee shop, while the fifth floor includes a café/conference space with a view to the north.