Essentia Health’s St. Mary’s Medical Center, Duluth, Minn.: 2024 Design Showcase Award Of Merit

Opened in July 2023, Essentia Health’s new St. Mary’s Medical Center comprises new construction and renovated space of existing facilities to deliver a replacement hospital and outpatient clinics.

Before bringing the facility to Lake Superior’s banks in Duluth, Minn., the project team had to overcome a variety of site challenges, including a 100-foot elevation change, multiple entrances, and the need to connect with two separate existing buildings and two bisecting streets.

Inside, the  930,000-square-foot community hospital, submitted to the Design Showcase by EwingCole (Philadelphia), integrates amenity spaces such as dining, retail, and community rooms with an interior aesthetic inspired by the cultural and natural landscape of Duluth.

Additionally, the project’s interior features daylighting and views to the outdoors, while a palette of vibrant colors and bright whites helps mitigate the effects of the region’s gray winter months.

Here, Saul Jabbawy, regional director of design at EwingCole, talks about creating a new medical destination for the city.

Healthcare Design: How does the architecture balance the client’s request for a design that reflects the historic architecture of Duluth in a modern, cutting-edge facility?

Saul Jabbawy: At the base of the podium, which visually affects the pedestrian experience, the design incorporated striated masonry blocks, articulated with deep openings and sunshades that recall the texture and visual complexity of the Victorian architecture of Superior Street. A base of large-scale tiles recalls the black volcanic stone that clads many of the buildings in the area.

Wood-look mullions, canopies, retaining walls, and gardens add additional details that can be found in the local architecture.

While these elements speak to the historic architecture, their configurations and intermixing with glass talk to a more modern institution. For example, the upper podium and the patient tower rise above the masonry components, and both are articulated with glassy curtain walls adorned with a ceramic-frit pattern that speaks to the iconic fog that emerges out of Lake Superior.

The curvature of the tower and the podium volumes soften the building. Together, these elements broadcast a contemporary and cutting-edge image. Outdoor balconies cut the tower’s glass and the upper podium while recalling the multiple platforms and viewing balconies that dot the Duluth landscape.

HCD: One of the project goals was to invigorate downtown Duluth with engaging public amenities. Why was this important and how was it achieved?

The client leadership envisioned an institution and a building that integrated into the community’s daily life. The new facility would not just be a place where community members visit when addressing a health issue.

The aspiration was to offer amenities, such as a street-level café, community room, conference center, catholic church, nonecumenical place of worship, eating destinations, and a roof garden to invite the community into the building.

Essentia Health’s leadership team believed that the barriers between the community and its healthcare provider would diminish if the building’s design reflected that of a public institution.

Diminishing these barriers would allow Essentia to provide better health education and a continuum of care supporting a healthy and vibrant community.

HCD: Share the project team’s process for addressing site challenges on this project and how those solutions impacted the facility’s medical planning.

The team began the process by mapping the connections to an existing building, the bisecting streets, and the street elevations of the site at the critical street points of access.

Next, based on urban conditions, traffic conditions, and the existing building’s program distribution, the team located the outpatient programs at the lower part of the site, along Superior Street, and the inpatient programs between First and Second Streets with access from Second Street.

The change in elevation between Second Street and lower First Street made the tucking of the emergency department below the inpatient tower, with its access from First Street, possible.

EwingCole also expanded the service docks at the existing building along the alleyway and positioned the logistics and service components of the campus.

The specific portals resulted in the building of program stacks, bridged by inpatient and outpatient components: the public floor serving the entire community, the mother/child floor, and the surgery floor with separate outpatient and inpatient intakes.

HCD: How is the tower’s shape designed to combat the area’s severe winds and weather?

The building was designed as an aerodynamic, elliptical pill shape, minimizing turbulence at the tower’s end condition: the roof garden and the inpatient entrance. This shape is broken at the center to provide the centrally located family zones with a direct view of the lake.

The tapering shape, widest at the tower’s center, also allowed space to introduce a central service corridor at the building core and additional space for multiple building cores and support programs.

HCD: What notable interior design features are used to deliver an interior aesthetic that reflects the area’s culture and natural landscape?

The interior of the building introduces garden-like elements—trellises, planters, vegetation, green walls, and imagery—throughout the public and treatment areas of the project.

Imagery scattered in the project celebrates Duluth’s landscapes, including lakesides, Birch and Conifer forests, creeks and waterfalls, formal gardens, and cultural landmarks.

The design also utilizes natural imagery for wayfinding and to differentiate the spatial quality and colors of the multiple zones. Unique narrative maps begin to tie together the many stories of the landscape of Duluth, transforming the comforting and uplifting images into a museum where visitors and patients can learn about the cultural and natural history of the region.

In the Dining Commons, themes and references to the Native American traditions of the Ojibwa tribe are incorporated, celebrating their rich history and respect for the natural world. For example, framed birch bark, recalling the material for tipis and canoes, is used in screens that provide intimate seating environments.

Sculptural ceiling elements echo the individual shapes of canoes and snowshoes, while below a terrazzo floor pattern recollects the waves of Lake Superior. Finally, large-scale archival images also help tell the story of the Native American community’s connection to the lake and the land.

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].