BJC HealthCare’s Campus Renewal Project-Plaza West Tower, St. Louis: First Look
Courtesy of CannonDesign
BJC Campus Renewal - Plaza West Tower: The new entryway will include an expanded, landscaped drive with a welcoming entry canopy at the street-level lobby.
Courtesy of CannonDesign
BJC Campus Renewal - Plaza West Tower: A new glass-enclosed lobby addition will welcome patients and visitors at street level of Barnes-Jewish Hospital. The lobby is two stories to help with wayfinding and to connect to the main campus circulation, called “The Link,” on the second floor. Three new glass-enclosed elevators connect the street and main-level lobbies.
Courtesy of CannonDesign
BJC Campus Renewal - Plaza West Tower: The tower will include 280 private inpatient rooms across nine floors, with many rooms having sweeping views of the nearby Forest Park. All inpatient rooms will also have pandemic readiness measures, such as the ability to transfer to a negative pressure environment for infectious diseases.
Courtesy of CannonDesign
BJC Campus Renewal - Plaza West Tower: Respite spaces for patients and staff alike will offer expansive views of St. Louis.
Barnes-Jewish Hospital Plaza West Tower, St. Louis
Expected to be completed in 2025, the new 660,000-square-foot Plaza West Tower at Barnes-Jewish Hospital (BJH) will be located on the Washington University Medical Campus in St. Louis. The new tower is part of owner’s BJC HealthCare’s campus renewal project to replace and renovate outdated patient care facilities on the medical campus.
The 164-acre Washington University Medical Campus encompasses BJH, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, and Washington University School of Medicine.
Planning a new patient tower
The 16-story Plaza West Tower will include seven floors of private inpatient rooms for heart and vascular patients (224 beds) and two floors of intensive care units (56 beds), as well as 124 surgical prep and recovery rooms and 32 medical imaging and interventional radiology rooms.
Additional features will include two rooftop gardens and a spacious family lounge with a business center, kitchenette, quiet rooms, and a laundry facility.
The tower will also house a new kitchen and dietary center for patient meals and a public cafeteria with outdoor dining. The project team includes CannonDesign (St Louis) as the architecture and interior design firm on the project.
Exterior design to complement existing campus
This building will complete a four-block elevation along Kingshighway Boulevard, a major north-south artery, which faces a park. To relate the massing to adjacent buildings, the tower will be set back from the building base to create a varying height relationship between the podium and adjacent buildings to take advantage of the defining skyline.
Two exterior roof gardens will sit at the transition from the podium base to the tower and be accessible to family and staff.
Taking inspiration from previous phases of the campus renewal project, the tower’s exterior material palette will include natural limestone, glass, metal panels, and concrete panels.
A semi-circular enclosed glass tower on the corner of the building will run from top to bottom and offer views to nearby parks.
Delivering a botanical-inspired interior design
The interior design will be based on a botanical concept called “A Journey Through Neighboring Gardens.” Each floor will be represented by a different neighboring garden in St. Louis, with imagery and graphics that reflect botanicals found within that garden.
Additionally, the project will include artwork and suspended sculptures in the public entry spaces. Each sculpture will include a distinct color for wayfinding that will relate to the botanical concept and color story for the new tower and plaza entry.
Flexible design for pandemic preparedness
Additionally, flexible design features will be included to enable pandemic preparedness, such as negative pressure capabilities and enhanced mechanical systems. All acute care rooms will meet code minimum intensive care unit (ICU) standards to isolate potentially infectious patients and accommodate sudden surges in higher-acuity patients.
Telemonitoring infrastructure will also be added to acute care rooms to enable continuous monitoring without the need for staff to enter the room as frequently.
As part of lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses and care staff will have multiple ways to monitor ICU patients from outside the room, from charting alcoves outside the room to access ports in the hallway to control patient vitals and medications.
BJC Campus Renewal – Plaza West Tower project details
Location: St. Louis
Project completion date: Fall 2025
Owner: BJC HealthCare
Total building area: 660,000 sq. ft.
Total construction cost: Not disclosed
Cost/sq. ft.: Not disclosed
Architect: CannonDesign
Interior designer: CannonDesign
General contractor: McCarthy Building Companies Inc.
Engineers: BR+A (consulting engineer), Thornton Tomasetti (structural); Castle Contracting (civil)
Landscape designer: DTLS
Medical equipment planner: BJC HealthCare
Builder: McCarthy Building Companie, Inc.
Art consultant: Arch Design
Art/pictures: BJC HealthCare
Fabric/textiles: BJC HealthCare
Furniture—seating/case goods: Color Art
Handrails/wall guards: Inpro
Headwalls/booms: ERG (headwalls, case work), Hilrom (booms)
Signage/wayfinding: Fast Signs
Project details are provided by the design team and not vetted by Healthcare Design.
