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Designing an operating room able to accommodate MRI equipment has been a challenge for SRG Partnership senior associate Bryan Higgins.

“It’s among the most complicated rooms you can work on,” he said. “It’s a small, little project, but it has everything involved.”

Place that intraoperative MRI equipment for pediatric brain surgery in a new wing on a steep hill next to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, part of Oregon Health & Science University in Southwest Portland, and the project gets trickier. Site access for construction crews will be difficult. Plus, work involves anchoring the two-story hospital expansion to bedrock.

“It will be a complicated construction process, and structurally it’s pretty challenging,” Higgins said. “They’re really drilling into the rock to hold this thing up on the hillside. It’s like a balloon tethered to the rock in a way.”

When Doernbecher hired SRG Partnership two and a half years ago for a project feasibility study, plans called for renovating the existing operating suite. Higgins said he realized quickly that not only was there insufficient space for the MRI machine, but a renovation would be costly, slow and a disruption to hospital operations.

“I almost jokingly said, ‘There is plenty of room outside the building,’ and (hospital officials) were interested,” he said. “It worked out surprisingly well.”

Hoffman Construction crews recently started work on the $17.4 million project to build a 10,000-square-foot addition tying into the existing seventh and eighth floors. The new eighth-floor operating room will feature an 18,000-pound MRI machine suspended from ceiling rails; it will be able to slide over the operating table and scan patients during surgeries to treat brain tumors or epilepsy.

When the project finishes in early 2016, the children’s hospital will be one of the first on the West Coast with such a device, said Dr. Nathan Selden, head of pediatric neurosurgery. The technology allows surgeons to get a clearer picture as they operate, leading to a higher success rate of removing pediatric brain tumors, he said.

“We can see deep fibers and functional areas during surgery itself with the skull open,” Selden said. “With the new technology, we’ll be able to do more and for many kids do more with fewer operations.”

Because of the massive scale of an MRI machine and its sensitivity to vibrations and radio frequencies, its incorporation into an operating room required a lot of considerations, Higgins said. The room’s floor and ceiling will be reinforced to accommodate the giant, heavy magnet inside the device and prevent it from shaking. Also, the floor, ceiling and walls will be lined with a thin sheet of copper to block radio frequencies that could disrupt MRI pictures.

“It ends up being a room-within-a-room,” Higgins said. “We’ve created a box of copper.”

A removable panel on the exterior wall will allow the construction crew to slide the MRI machine directly into the operating room and eventually remove the device when it needs to be replaced.

When the project morphed from a renovation to an expansion, the SRG Partnership design team was tasked with finding the best way to incorporate the addition. At first, they considered matching the existing facade, Higgins said.

“The more we started sketching it, the more we realized we were never going to match that (existing) white panel,” he said.

Instead, the design team opted for a metal and glass facade that blends into the forested hillside without disrupting the lines of the current hospital.

“It just kind of (then) almost pays more respect to the existing building than trying to mimic it,” Higgins said.

Planning a cohesive expansion that accommodates sensitive technology on a difficult build site has kept Higgins on his toes throughout the design process.

“It makes it a lot more fun for me when everything is sort of challenging,” he said.

Doernbecher Children’s Hospital expansion

Location: 3181 S.W. Sam Jackson Park Road, Portland

Construction start date: June 2014

Anticipated construction completion date: early 2016

Owner: Oregon Health & Science University

Architect: SRG Partnership

Landscape architect: WHPacific

Structural engineer: Catena Consulting Engineers

Mechanical and electrical engineer: Mazzetti

Civil engineer: WHPacific

General contractor: Hoffman Construction