A planned expansion of the OHSU Hospital has gone in front of the Design Commission to receive Design Advice. The 14-story, 525,300 sq ft building is being designed by NBBJ architects with Mayer/Reed landscape architects.

The OHSU Hospital Expansion will be built on a site sandwiched between lower Campus Drive and upper Campus Drive, which was formerly home to the 1956 School of Dentistry. Demolition of the existing building was completed in 2018. The OHSU Elks Children’s Eye Clinic will be built immediately to the east of the hospital expansion.

The future Marquam Hill Connector will connect OHSU to a MAX stop on Barbur Blvd. The upper landing for the connector has yet to be determined, however it could land near the intersection of SW Campus Drive and Terwilliger Blvd, which would create a significant increase to pedestrian traffic along lower Campus Drive.

The lowest level of the building will be at lower Campus Drive, where there will be a covered entry porte-cochere for drop-offs and pick-ups. The ground floor of the building will include a public lobby, bicycle storage and building support functions. Above the ground floor will be three floors of structured parking, accessed from upper Campus Drive.

Levels 3 through 8 of the building (consistent with the OHSU campus floor numbering scheme) will include clinical services, including triage, antepartum, adult care beds, mother-baby units and a neonatal intensive care unit. One of the goals of the project is to establish a comprehensive fetal surgery program, something currently lacking in the Pacific Northwest. With the new building OHSU would become one of only a handful of hospitals in the nation that offers comprehensive care for mother, baby and neonate in one location.

Levels 9 and 10 would be shelled space for future expansion. Level 2 and a rooftop penthouse would serve mechanical and electrical needs.

Above the parking and mechanical levels the building is arranged in a U-shaped massing, open to the east. The massing is designed to preserve views to the south from the Kohler Pavilion, while enhancing the view of Marquam Hill from the east. The massing chosen also minimizes construction impacts by preserving a utiliy corridor and the the existing retaining wall holding up upper Campus Drive.

The patient bed facades would employ a staggered arrangement, with a pattern created from metal panel and vision glass. The east facing facades have a vertical gradient pattern, while the west facade has a folded metal pattern.

Skybridges over upper Campus Drive will connect the hospital expansion to the existing OHSU Hospital building and to the Kohler Pavilion.

The OHSU Hospital Expansion Project went in front of the Design Commission for the first time on May 5th, 2019. As noted in a summary memo the Commission was “generally supportive of the project concept and scale, but had strong concerns with the preferred massing”. Issues raised included that the south wall facing lower Campus Drive “was too imposing and should be setback to not detract from the entry sequence and pedestrian realm” and that the “porte-cochere appears too compressed, dark, and deep.”

The project is currently scheduled to return for a second Design Advice Request meeting on June 27th, 2019.

Drawings

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