- The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center recently opened the 1.9 million-square-foot, 26-story University Hospital on its campus.
- The project team, including HDR, overcame challenges with building on a constrained 4-acre urban site.
- Part of Ohio State’s Framework 2.0 master plan, the project increases capacity on the academic medical campus with 820 private inpatient beds, 24 operating rooms, 10 interventional radiology suites, 234 ICU beds, and the region’s only Level IV maternity unit.
When The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio, opened its new University Hospital in February, the 1.9 million-square-foot, 26-story tower became the largest single-facility construction project in the university’s history and one of the largest hospitals to open in the U.S. this year.
Rising 410 feet, the tower will deliver 820 private inpatient beds when fully built out to capacity, along with 24 operating rooms, 10 interventional radiology suites, 234 ICU beds, organ transplant and neurosciences programs, and the region’s only Level IV maternity unit.
As part of Framework 2.0, the university’s master plan finalized in 2017, Ohio State set out to increase capacity beyond two mid-century facilities to meet expected population growth while reenvisioning the future of care across its academic medical campus.
Although the scope was massive, “this project was never simply about building a larger hospital,” says Mohammed Ayoub, design director at HDR (New York), the university’s architecture and design partner. “We weren’t just adding capacity. We were creating the next chapter in a master plan that reimagines how medicine will be delivered, taught, and discovered.”
How Ohio State Master-planned Its New Bed Tower on a Constrained Urban Site
As the flagship of an integrated healthcare ecosystem, the new tower connects on every level to The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute, known as The James. This connection shifts the center of the medical campus westward while linking specialized services and operational support, creating a more cohesive flow.
Fitting a nearly 2 million-square-foot facility into a tight, 4-acre urban site required years of upfront planning, which began around 2015 in tandem with the master plan. This triggered an enabling project to relocate a major roadway on the western edge of campus, clearing 12 acres of land next to The James. With that project underway, schematic design of the new tower began in 2018, followed by design development in 2019 and groundbreaking in 2020.
The prolonged timeline gave the project “time to mature,” Ayoub says, allowing the design team to visit other medical centers, gather input from staff across 20 departments, and test multiple design iterations. Parametric modeling software helped simulate how layout decisions would affect travel times and material flow, enabling designers to identify adjacencies and prevent bottlenecks.
Arranging all planned functions into the tower required extensive study of circulation and useable space, according to Ragan Fallang, executive project manager at The Ohio State University (Columbus). Budget pressure forced the team to minimize nonclinical programs while prioritizing OR and inpatient bed counts to meet projected demand.
To maximize clinical space and control costs, core support functions—such as primary loading docks, lab space, and most faculty offices—remained in existing buildings, while the new tower provides a few satellite offices and hoteling workspaces.
The project’s long timeline also created a handoff challenge, since many of the people who designed the operational flows were not involved in activation. To maintain alignment, the design team developed a detailed “owner’s manual” documenting how each department and traffic flow should function. This bridged design intent through leadership turnover, preserving the carefully mapped journeys and adjacencies produced through years of planning.
How does The Ohio State University Hospital connect to The James?
The key to fitting such a large building into a relatively tight corner of an existing campus was treating the new tower as an addition rather than a standalone building, Ayoub says.
A continuous staff corridor was essential to enabling movement between the first five floors of both buildings, which house clinical support spaces, imaging, and surgery. Connecting this main thoroughfare required relocating an egress stair from The James into the new tower, improving the transfer of equipment, supplies, and patients.
Aesthetically, the design team sought cohesion while introducing a new vision for the hospital. “From a design perspective, folding into The James was a challenge because we wanted to modernize the tower while still tying back to existing spaces,” says Amy Mays, director of interiors for the health design practice at HDR (New York). “They had to complement each other to make sure the transition didn’t feel disjointed.”
The solution was extending the brick band on the front of The James across the lower levels of the new tower “to marry the two structures together,” Fallang says. This brick “scroll,” as the project team called it, terminates in a curved feature over one of the entrances, smoothing the transition between the buildings.
“We were respectfully recognizing the brick identity of the campus,” Ayoub explains, adding that as the tower rises, those legacy materials transition to high-performance glass and mocha cream-colored stone “to give it some earthiness and keep it grounded.”
Inside, public spaces in the new lobby, café, and dining areas feature Palladiana terrazzo flooring to complement the terrazzo palette found throughout The James. “We wanted to be consistent, so you intuitively know you’re on the right path,” Mays says.
Together, these consistencies strengthen the relationship between the new tower and the existing hospital. “By connecting these buildings aesthetically, it shows that the medical center is multiple hospitals working together for common goals,” says John Stiles, director of planning at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (Columbus).
How Façade Design Breaks Down the Monumental Scale of Ohio State’s Hospital
Making a massive facility feel approachable required breaking down its scale to help patients and visitors feel comfortable and grounded. One key element is the glass-faced “lantern,” a fin-like centerpiece that divides the inpatient floors into north and south units of 30 beds. The lantern houses waiting areas on each inpatient floor, enhancing the visitor experience by letting in light and framing expansive views across campus to downtown Columbus.
Another design detail that shapes the experience is the undulating “sawtooth” façade, created by alternating glass and limestone planes that zigzag in and out to form a serrated pattern on the tower.
“The oscillation of the tower creates a bay window in each patient room,” Ayoub explains, “so there’s a nook where you feel cradled and safe, yet you still have beautiful views out.” From the outside, this feature “creates a rhythm that looks like glass from certain angles and like stone from other angles,” Fallang adds, “making the building more visually dynamic.”
Inside, the design team used a concise palette rooted in the university’s brand. “Quiet elegance was the theme for the interior,” Fallang explains. Using the university’s brand colors as a foundation, the design team applied scarlet and gray in varying intensities throughout the building.
For example, red pops up sparingly in signage and public seating, while stainless steel buckeye leaves (a nod to the university’s team name and Ohio’s state tree) appear in the lobby terrazzo. “In the cafes, we used darker, richer tones with high-contrast gray and red to create drama,” Mays says. “Then, as you transition up to the clinical spaces, it becomes a much softer palette with a warmer gray complemented by wood accents.”
How Ohio State Built Its Bed Tower to Accommodate Future Capacity
University Hospital opened 622 of its 820 inpatient beds in February. The remaining beds were shelled to a near-final state—beyond bare concrete floors and stud walls but without equipment. “We’ve unshelled spaces before and found it to be very disruptive,” Stiles says. “Constructing our shelled clinical areas to a final state allows us to move more quickly if we see volumes increasing quicker than anticipated—and, in fact, we are.”
The hospital equipped 24 additional beds on July 1 and plans to open another 90 by year’s end. Stiles expects 24-54 more beds to be outfitted next year, leaving 30-60 shelled rooms for future growth. Some inpatient units can also flex from step-down to ICU rooms as critical care demand grows. The organ transplant floor features 60 universal progressive care rooms designed to support the full continuum of care, with clearances and medical gas inputs for higher acuity.
Ultimately, the project’s success came down to the foresight of the university’s master plan. “Hospitals should never feel like isolated buildings,” Ayoub says. “Our role as architects is improving relationships between spaces by looking at how the entire ecosystem functions. We’re not just designing a beautiful building; we’re designing the conditions for better care.”
Brooke Bilyj is a freelance writer and owner of Bantamedia (Cleveland) and can be reached at [email protected].
The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center University Hospital project details
Project: The Ohio State University Hospital
Location: Columbus, Ohio
Completion date: February 2026
Owner: The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
Total building area: 1.9 million sq. ft.
Total construction cost: $1.9 billion
Cost/sq. ft.: $1,000
Architect: HDR
Interior designer: HDR
General contractor: Walsh/Turner
Engineer: Magnusson Klemencic Associates (MKA)
Medical equipment planner: HDR
Art/pictures: Giles Miller with HDR (sculpture)
Fabric/textiles: Knoll, Momentum, Architex, Mayer, ArcCom
Furniture—seating/casegoods: SITU (custom bench) Arper, Davis, Bernhardt, Miller Knoll, Cumberland, Carolina, Howe
Headwalls/booms: Amico, Baxter
Lighting: Lutron (sculpture)
Signage/wayfinding: Columbus Sign
Project details are provided by the design team and not vetted by Healthcare Design.
