Only a couple of weeks after unveiling its new $250 million children’s hospital, is planning a $25 million renovation to convert vacant pediatric space into adult intensive care units.

A total of 105,000 square feet of space in three hospital buildings – the west wing, the north tower and Emmanuel central – will be gutted and repurposed.

“We conduct state-of-the-art critical care, and we’re matching our facilities to the care we provide,” said Lori Morgan, the hospital’s chief administrative officer. “We’ve been doing 2020 care in 1960s rooms, and it’s been hard.”

On the third floor of the west wing, where the pediatric intensive care unit was, a new ICU for adults will specialize in neurotrama.

The second floor of Emanuel central will be converted from an ICU for infants into a cardiovascular ICU, where patients will be able to regain dexterity in a gym and a kitchen.

In the north tower, another trauma care unit will be built for adults. This will let the hospital’s emergency room expand into the former adult ICU space.

Morgan said new walls will be built, new fixtures will be installed and wiring will be added. Hallways and waiting areas will be reconstructed to accommodate the rooms’ new sizes.

“These rooms have to have a lot of technological requirements in terms of gas hookups and suction – most of our patients are very ill,” she said. “Our mission is not to necessarily make more rooms, but make our existing rooms bigger and better.”

By adding space, Morgan said doctors and patients will have more room to maneuver.

“We do a lot of ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation), so patients will be on an ECMO machine and a giant ventilator and their families will want to be in the room with them – there’s just not a lot of space for mobility currently,” she said.

Dave Guthrie of , which is designing the project, said the new fixtures, such as ultra-sensitive lighting and rubber flooring, will make the hospital experience less distressing for patients. Guthrie added that new bathrooms and nourishment stations will be built for the medical staff.

A new waiting room for patients’ families will be built. Unlike the existing waiting room, near the emergency room and the ICUs, this one will be farther from the medical units, giving visitors a quiet place to rest.

“We understand that people spend long durations at the hospital waiting for family members, so we attempted to create a really comfortable living space there,” Guthrie said. “There will be family conference rooms and health care research rooms (attached to the waiting room) with Internet connections for family members to look up whatever medical problems they may be dealing with.”

Guthrie said ZGF and Hoffman Construction, the project’s general contractor, will face a number of challenges once construction begins. Although the rooms are being expanded, ceiling heights will remain the same, so some machinery may not fit easily. Additionally, the hospital will remain in use during the renovation; Guthrie said airflow management will require construction on the building’s mechanical shafts, which connect to air handlers on the roof.

“We’re going to have to break construction down to as many as six phases in order to not disrupt their operations, he said. “It’s been one of the things we’ve been examining closely.”

The first phase of the renovation is set to start on April 2 and finish in about a year, according to Guthrie.

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Before Intel started building like crazy in Hillsboro, the new Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel was the largest private construction project happening in the Portland area. ZGF designed and Hoffman is constructing the building, which is now visible from the Fremont Bridge – it’s the one big building in the middle of its neighborhood.

The nine-story, 330,000 square-foot building is well on its way to finished– it should be open in February. And now, thanks to the Internet and marketing budgets, you can take a fly-through tour of a computer-animated model. Check it out:

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Hospitals can be intimidating – that was the starting point for design of the new home for The Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel.

The nine-story building won’t really resemble a hospital on the inside: ceilings, walls and floors will be paneled with wood; every patient room will be private and have a pull-out couch for visitors; and family lounges, gardens and even an art studio are designed to avoid a clinical feel.

“Kids can be in the hospital for days, for weeks and even months,” said Sue Ann Barton, principal at Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects.

The $250 million, 334,000-square-foot, nine-floor building will rise above its neighbors in Northeast Portland. Architectural renderings show the building as a visible monument from across the Willamette River.

Presently, The Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel is housed within the greater hospital building, but the new facility will include the first pediatric-only emergency department in Oregon where children will have a building and entrance separate from adults, said Ali Sadri, senior manager of property management for Legacy Health System.

“The thing with kids (is that) when they get sick, the whole family comes,” said Sharron van der Meulen, a ZGF principal. The design team tried, as much as possible, to make rooms feel homey by concealing technological equipment.

“There’s more and more medical equipment in the patient rooms,” said Mark Peckover, an engineer with Sparling. “The challenge is to integrate that so it doesn’t feel like a sterile environment for the patient and family, but is still functional for staff.”

The design team constructed prototypes of every typical room type in a nearby Legacy building and then asked doctors and nurses to test them out. The team started with models in foam core and then built complete rooms with every element: from furniture to light switches and paper-towel holders.

“Things you don’t think they’re going to care about, they care about,” said van der Meulen.

“Because there’s all these built-in elements, you really want to make sure that they work for staff,” said Halliday Meisburger, associate partner with ZGF. “All the drawings in the world can’t take the place of actually touching and feeling something.”

“We were making changes all along the way,” Barton said. “Even during construction, we made a few changes that were vital to the operations.”

ZGF would like to use the process for all of its projects, but it isn’t always possible.

“It’s expensive, honestly,” Barton said. “It takes a lot of resources.”

Sustainable design can be difficult in medical facilities because of legal requirements for lighting and air circulation, but some energy-efficiency features were included. Peckover said the lighting is projected to use 25 percent less energy than Oregon code requires, and CDI Engineers selected high-efficiency chillers and boilers for the building’s HVAC system.

The building was specifically designed to not have a highly efficient envelope, Meisburger noted. In medical buildings, fresh air needs to be flushed through the building several times an hour, so a low-circulation air system wasn’t an option.

However, heat and cool air will be recovered as air is flushed through the building, said Richard Gerber with CDI Engineers.

Legacy is working to raise the remaining $25 million needed to complete the project. Work started in 2007 and is on track to wrap up in February 2012, Sadri said.

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The Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel won’t resemble a hospital on the inside: ceilings, walls and floors will be paneled with wood; every patient room will be private and have a pull-out couch for visitors; and family lounges, gardens and even an art studio are designed to avoid a clinical feel.

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Snowmen, candy canes, Christmas trees and a reindeer have been created from construction materials to be displayed for kids spending the holiday season at the Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel. According to Sarah Redlinger, field superintendent at the new hospital for Hoffman Construction Co., workers received a card from the mother of one of the patients that started out “Dear Construction Angels” and went on to describe the joy that the sculptures had brought to her child. Companies and their workers that participated in the project were: Hoffman Structures Inc., Temp Control Mechanical, Basic Fire Protection, Advanced Pneumatic Tubes, JH Kelly, Oregon Electric Group and Fred Shearer & Sons.

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Ironworkers from Local 29 set the beam after a ceremony attended by dozens of supporters of the nine-story, 330,000-square-foot Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel in North Portland. The hospital is expected to be completed in 2012 and hold 165 private rooms, a 22-bed day surgery unit, a pediatric intensive care unit and a neonatal intensive care unit. Hoffman Construction Co. is the general contractor, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership is the architect and Inici Group is the project manager.

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