Baptist Health Care Pensacola – Brent Lane Campus, Florida: 2024 Design Showcase Award Of Merit

As the new home for the Florida panhandle’s only not-for-profit health system, Baptist Health Care Pensacola’s Brent Lane Campus includes a 264-bed hospital, medical office building, and behavioral health center.

Opened in September 2023, the project sought to deliver a public space and architecture strategy that reflects its locale and contributes positively to the city.

The 768,000-square-foot community hospital project was submitted to the Design Showcase by Gresham Smith (Nashville, Tenn.).

It utilizes a town-square concept that organizes the new campus around greenspace, enabling the preservation of massive live oaks and magnolias on the site, while meeting sustainable and resilient design standards to ensure the facility’s longevity.

Here, Lead Architectural Designer Christopher Hoal, healthcare market design lead at Gresham Smith, and Lead Interior Designer Carolyn Blake, healthcare technical practice leader at Gresham Smith, share insights into some of the project’s planning and design strategies.

Healthcare Design: How did the importance of greenspace and rethinking parking on a hospital campus become central to this project, and how did it shape the overall planning and design?

Chris Hoal: Baptist Health Care asked Gresham Smith to deliver a hospital design “rooted to the community of Pensacola.” As we explored site planning ideas, preserving and celebrating the over-200-year-old oak trees grew into the primary organizing principle.

Placing green space in the heart of the campus became the strategy for wayfinding, circulation, and creating a sense of place.

Parking is pushed to the periphery so the town square can create a dramatic first impression but is still convenient to building entrances. Public circulation inside and outside the buildings is organized around the town square, while staff, ambulance, and delivery traffic is routed behind the buildings.

Because the town square is visible from all public areas inside the buildings, visitors can confidently navigate the large healthcare campus using intuitive visual cues.

HCD: The project set an ambitious 100-year lifespan goal with the intent that this hospital be designed to be maximally resilient. How did you approach the design to meet that goal and what are some of the strategies employed here?

Carolyn Blake: Having previously faced the Florida Panhandle’s most catastrophic storms such as Hurricane Ivan in 2004, Baptist Hospital desired a new campus that could withstand major weather events.

Gresham Smith’s team, including climate scientists, conducted a climate risk assessment that examined the effects of global warming on the region and studied future rainfall projections. The team then worked with the hospital to identify resiliency priorities and develop design solutions that included system efficiencies and utility redundancies.

This process led to a design that provides four days of off-grid capacity. In addition, first-floor elevations can accommodate 1,000-year flood levels; the structure and building envelope can withstand Category 5 hurricanes and 170-mph wind gusts; and the N+1 mechanical strategy minimizes service disruptions with one more additional unit than is required.

Although the hospital experience is open and inviting, the core and shell has been hardened to maintain life-saving operations during a weather event.

HCD: In addition to resiliency, sustainability was a big goal on the project. What are some of the notable energy- and water-saving design strategies on this project?

Hoal: The site is irrigated completely with storm water that’s collected and stored in three underground basins; no potable water is used for irrigation. Storm and well-water also supply all of the cooling tower water needs under normal conditions. It is estimated this strategy will save 3.6 million gallons of purchased potable water each year.

The inpatient tower is oriented east to west on the site for energy efficiency and to minimize glare in patient rooms. Most of the glazing and waiting areas are on the northern façade to minimize heat gain and provide thermally comfortable public spaces.

Glazing on the first two floors is fabricated with bird-safe ceramic frit (consisting of more than 400,000 dots), which does double duty by reducing heat gain in the concourse and waiting areas.

HCD: The project’s prefabrication and materials selection strategies resulted in embodied carbon savings as well. Explain.

Hoal: Environmental sensitivity is one of the ways that Baptist Health Care is committed to supporting the well-being of the Pensacola community. This includes measuring and designing to reduce embodied carbon of the new facility.

Transportation emissions were reduced by working with local partners to prefabricate 958 lightweight, precast concrete panels just 86 miles from the hospital site (using Pensacola’s famous white sand as the fine aggregate).

The weight of each panel is reduced by 1/3 compared to traditional precast. This dramatically cut the embodied carbon of both the panels and the superstructure.

Additionally, the blowing agent for the spray foam insulation was specified to eliminate hydrofluorocarbons, which reduced the global warming potential of the entire precast system by an additional 33 percent.

HCD: The aesthetics of the project are described as a “love letter to the Florida panhandle.” What did that phrase mean to the project team, and how did it guide the exterior and interior design strategies?

Blake: The project team was inspired by Pensacola’s miles of Gulf coastline where the sand dunes overlook a distant horizon.

We interpreted the ripples of water and sand, as well as the scale of the horizon, into the façade. The subtle color variation of the beach is replicated in the array of sand-blasted, textured, and polished panels of precast concrete.

In the public concourse, dramatic light fixtures and brass inlays in the terrazzo pattern evoke sunbeams passing through Spanish moss against a backdrop of oak trees through the two-story curtain wall.

Additionally, more than 130 supergraphics and a full-spectrum color palette ground the space in its regional context. The team used terracotta both inside and out to reference the many historic fired-clay buildings in Pensacola’s downtown.

HCD: How did the project team create a town square to define the campus and how does that element deliver a new amenity for the community as a whole?

Hoal: A common refrain during the site design process was “Sometimes as designers our job is to just not ruin the beauty that’s already here.”

Once Baptist Health Care adopted the site concept, the design team ordered a survey that identified each tree species, its health, biodiversity value, and estimated future lifespan to provide a framework for the landscape design.

Since opening, the 2-acre town square has become a new community space with people from all over Pensacola driving here to eat in the park or do yoga on the lawn. Amenities include rehab walking trails, healing gardens, exercise lawns, and lunch tables.

HCD: This new medical campus replaces a 1950s-era facility. What planning and design strategies did you employ in the clinical spaces to adapt to future changes and evolution of healthcare delivery?

Blake: All public spaces are oriented around the town square, which will maintain clear circulation and intuitive wayfinding as the campus grows.

To provide flexibility and enhance efficiency, every patient and support space is standardized and same-handed to the greatest possible extent. Options for vertical and horizontal expansion are baked into the design, with soft spaces strategically located adjacent to critical functions for in-place expansion.

To minimize travel distances in the hospital, co-dependent departments and support services are side by side, high-use areas are centralized, and each nursing unit is organized into three 12-bed pods with dedicated team and support spaces.

In the MOB, identical, modular clinical areas can be reconfigured to accommodate new practices without renovation. For Baptist Health Care, staff well-being is also a high priority, so lightwells are provided deep in clinical areas of the hospital to bring in natural light and views.

For more coverage of Healthcare Design’s 2024 Design Showcase, go here.

Anne DiNardo is editor-in-chief of Healthcare Design. She can be reached at [email protected].