Mental health care has come a long way from the images of the Oregon State Hospital seared into people’s minds in the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Today’s modern facilities focus on soothing color palettes, art and music therapy. Patients are not physically restrained. Both outside and in, facilities more closely resemble a sprawling hotel than a hulking Italianate structure.

One of these new behavioral health hospitals opened in Vancouver, Washington, recently. General contractor , a 53,278-square-foot facility, on a former greenfield at 2805 N.E. 129th St.

The hospital features 72 in-patient beds, two to a room, in three separate pods. It was designed by Dallas-based GUIDE Architecture and has ample treatment and support space along with indoor and outdoor patient amenities to provide yoga, art, movement and pet therapy as well as nutritional counseling.

“I worked with Andersen when I was in Portland at Sunnyside, and I love these guys,” Rainier Springs CEO Gary Peterson said. “I think you’ll see they did a really, really nice job.”

Patient services cover full and partial hospitalization, outpatient care, addiction treatment and counseling, peer support and more.

The facility is owned and operated by Springstone, a Louisville, Kentucky-based developer and operator of behavioral health hospitals. The company has hospitals at 16 locations in Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina and Washington.

Rainier Springs’ design strives to present a comfortable, hotel-like setting for both patients and staff. But there is more to a project like this, of course.

“There are safety features built into everything,” Peterson said.

For instance, the so-called piano hinge used in virtually all doorways features a single long piece of metal running the length of the door. This eliminates the loops created by three separate hinges – loops through which potential ligatures could be placed and used by a suicidal individual to harm himself or herself. The piano hinge can even be removed from the outside of a room to allow removal of the entire door.

In the bathrooms, even water faucets are designed to eliminate the ability to loop a ligature around the taps. The same is true of even the handrails on the bathroom walls.

“We tried to eliminate as many ligature risks as possible,” Peterson said. “From the design of the faucets, the design of the toilets, even the grab bars, you can’t put your fingers through it. It’s still ADA compliant, but you couldn’t slide something through there to loop it around and harm yourself.”

On the flip side, the hospital also features the generous use of floor-to-ceiling windows, skylights and other features to allow natural light to enter the building.

“You’ll see the natural lighting,” Peterson said. “These areas are all secure, and all of our patient rooms are outside-facing. So they’re all along the outside and everyone has an outside view, and then the common spaces all have skylights, so there are lots of opportunities for natural light.”

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For more than 100 years, the state has operated the Oregon State Hospital on a large tract of land in Salem. In April 2012, the last patients were relocated to a new facility on the property’s southern portion. A 47-acre urban parcel known as the North Campus was declared surplus. The parcel, surrounded by city streets, has buildings containing approximately 500,000 square feet, large open spaces and mature trees.

The state is now looking to prepare the property for sale.

“Our plan is to demolish four buildings and keep two,” said Eric Grindy, senior real estate transaction and portfolio manager for the state. “The hope is that a developer will buy it and build something interesting and successful there. We have a preliminary schedule based on our best guesses. We think we’ll be done with the demolition and ready to transfer it to someone by about the middle of 2017.”

In July, the Oregon Legislature approved $8.3 million to complete hazardous materials abatement, demolition of buildings east of 25th Street and perform site preparation on the North Campus. The asbestos abatement will be critical.

“We did an RFP a couple of years ago for asbestos abatement and got zero interest,” Grindy said. “There is a lot of risk associated with those buildings and the asbestos that is in them and also some lead paint. People just didn’t want to take that on at any price. But we know that there could be some components of that related to that time in the recovery.”

A request is expected to be made for proposals from contractors interested in completing additional testing of hazardous materials, abatement and demolition from November 2015 to March 2016. The work is being overseen by the Department of Administrative Services and consultants, and is subject to change.

Because the site is located in a National Historic District, approval from the State Historic Preservation Office and the city of Salem will be required prior to demolition.

In 2012, Leland Consulting Group and Cushman & Wakefield were hired to determine a highest and best use for the North Campus as well as a strategy for potential future redevelopment. The greatest economic value for the site, according to the study, would be a mix of uses such as multi-generational and mixed-income housing, neighborhood retail, lodging and supportive services.

The DAS on Oct. 20 will give an update on efforts to prepare the North Campus for sale and redevelopment. The public is invited to attend the free presentation, which will take place at Fresh Start Market in Northeast Salem from 7 to 7:30 p.m. – prior to the general Northeast Salem Community Association meeting.

“It’s an update … to tell (interested parties) where we are in the process of trying to dispose of the property,” Grindy said.

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When the 220,000-square-foot, 174-bed Oregon State Hospital opens Jan. 1, 2015 in Junction City, it will look similar to its 850,000-square-head cousin in Salem, albeit much smaller. The new hospital will have one critical difference, however – a geothermal heat exchange system made possible because of the physical makeup of the 30-acre site itself.

“There’s a river underneath there,” said Cade Lawrence, project manager for Hoffman Construction, the construction manager-general contractor for both the Junction City and Salem state hospital projects. “We were able to pull that water out from there and use it to convert the heat or cool the air.”

Hoffman first had to fill with rock existing wetlands roughly eight feet deep, down to the water table, Lawrence said. The firm began building vertically in summer 2013, after approval was issued for most of the $84 million to pay for construction.

The decision to install an open-loop geothermal system for the Junction City hospital came from the abundance of underground water and the fact that the site is spread out, said Jim Sharpe, principal and project manager for the San Francisco office of Affiliated Engineers. It designed the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems for both the Salem and Junction City projects.

“The reason we did it is because of the site,” he said. “It’s just perfect. We couldn’t do it in a lot of places.”

The Salem hospital site, for example, did not have the geography needed, Sharpe said. So, crews in Junction City drilled two test wells to see how the heat exchange system would work.

“It was really to test the underground geography, to see if you can flow water from one end and it would flow back into the ground,” he said. “That test told us the geography was good.”

The water table starts at roughly eight feet beneath the surface and continues down to about 150 feet. Water temperatures at that depth are relatively stable – between 50 degrees and 55 degrees, he said.

The open-loop system, named because the pipes that draw water from the ground and eventually release it back into the earth are not connected, will allow the building to use 40 percent less energy than it would otherwise, Sharpe said.

A more standard, closed-loop system, which Hoffman built at the Port of Portland, would have involved 300 to 400 wells being bored into the ground and relied on soil temperatures to heat or cool water passing up through the earth. That would have ultimately raised costs, Sharpe said. Under the open-loop system, only eight wells had to be drilled, he said.

The system, installed by Wilsonville-based Hydro-Temp Mechanical, heats and cools the water through six heat recovery chillers, or heat pumps, installed in the building. The water makes its way from the aquifer through pipes to the chillers, which either raise the water temperature to heat the building or lower the temperature to cool the building. The water then moves from one end of the site to the other and is released back into the ground.

The project team toured Portland State University‘s similar, open-loop geothermal system, which also uses a heat exchanger to extract water from one place and put it back in another, Sharpe said. The main difference is that PSU’s well is roughly 800 feet deep and uses the vertical distance to heat or cool water, he said.

“We’re using distances horizontally when we put it back in the earth,” he said.

At peak usage during summer and winter, respectively, the system will pump between 400 and 800 gallons of water to cool and heat the building.

‘You need the underground aquifer and you need the distance,” Sharpe said. “You’ve got to have a good geology – there’s got to be good sand and gravel. If there is a lot of clay and rock, you can’t suck the water out very easily and it won’t want to go back in.”

Other sustainable features of the Junction City project include 442 photovoltaic panels installed on the building’s roof along with dozens of hydrothermal solar panels to heat water in the building, said Jodie Jones, Oregon Health Authority‘s administrator on the project.

Once funding was granted in July 2013, Hoffman and its project team accelerated the work by performing much of it off-site. One of its subcontractors, Knife River Corp., precast 256 panel walls at a Harrisburg location about five miles from Junction City.

The walls were on average about 52 feet tall and weighed 70,000 pounds, according to the Oregon Health Authority. When construction started, they were trucked about five miles to the Junction City site, and then lifted and put in place using large cranes, Lawrence said.

“It helped to have our precast ready to roll,” Lawrence said. “We went vertical fast and worked with our subs to make the schedule. Everybody did their job.”

Oregon State Hospital – Junction City

Construction cost: $84 million

Construction start date: July 2013

Anticipated completion date: Dec. 31, 2014

Construction manager-general contractor: Hoffman Construction Co.

Architect: HOK, SRG Partnership

Owner’s representative: CH2M HILL

Structural engineer: KPFF Consulting Engineers

Civil engineer: Westlake Consultants

MEP: Affiliated Engineers

Landscape: Walker Macy

Other consultants: SOLARC Engineering and Energy + Architectural Consulting

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Two Oregon projects have won awards for transforming outdated buildings into vibrant centers of excellence in two very different markets. Both projects showcase creative ways to sustainably transform older structures into reinvigorated contributors to the community.

The Oregon State Hospital Replacement project in Salem received a construction management excellence award from the Construction Management Association of America in the category of new construction with a value greater than $100 million. The project team included Oregon Health Authority, CH2M HILL, HOK, SRG and Hoffman Construction.

The Oregon State Hospital gained widespread recognition as the iconic location for the award-winning 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” starring Jack Nicholson. In continuous operation since 1883, it’s one of the oldest operating mental health facilities in the nation. It’s a big complex – 620 beds and more than 850,027 square feet integrating historic buildings with new facilities and nearly 300,000 square feet of outdoor areas. Adding to this project’s complexity was the need to keep the hospital operating during a rehab project of massive size and complexity.

The Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI) in Corvallis, Oregon won a 2012 Excellence in Technology Based Economic Development (TBED) award from the State Science & Technology Institute. The designer was IDC Architects, and the general contractor was Andersen Construction. ONAMI is a venture joining government and nanoscience R&D institutions to cultivate research and commercialization of nanotechnologies.  This award was in the program’s “Commercializing Research” category.

The ONAMI project saw an aging warehouse converted into Oregon’s first signature research center using a modest budget and a lot of design ingenuity. ONAMI exemplifies the international trend in the science and technology community to leverage more research capability with less capital investment to generate higher returns on research investments in private and university research environments.

The award-winning Oregon State Hospital Replacement and ONAMI projects are tributes to the Oregon design community’s vision for applying creative solutions to generate more value with less environmental impact by repurposing existing buildings.

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Renovation efforts at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem have been honored with a Project Achievement Award from the Construction Management Association of America.

John McKeon, the vice president of the association, said awards are given in a variety of categories based on the dollar amount of the project. The Oregon State Hospital is being honored as a new building project costing more than $100 million.

“It’s the biggest category we have,” McKeon said.

Submissions are made to an awards committee of some 40 association members, giving the final decision to a panel of three judges. McKeon said they look at a variety of factors, especially any unique features in the project.

“These days, that includes any unique sustainability and green energy features,” he said. “However, in this case, there are obviously a lot of unique features, given all the safety and treatment concerns.”

A $458 million renovation of the 129-year-old facility began in 2009. Many of the historic structures were preserved while creating a modern 620-bed hospital. The site is famous in cinematic history for being the location of the 1975 movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

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Building for mental health » At a time when the mentally ill were confined to prisons, poorhouses or worse, Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride in the latter part of the 19th century sought to spread his philosophy of moral and human treatment for the mentally ill through a publication called “On Construction, Organization and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane.” Read More

For Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, buildings were as important to the treatment of ‘lunacy’ as any medical procedure in the late 1800s.

So it could be seen as fitting that Oregon’s first museum dedicated to mental health be located inside of the Kirkbride-designed J Building on the Oregon State Hospital campus.

A proponent of the Moral Treatment philosophy, which advocated for humane care and moral discipline for the mentally ill, Kirkbride thought well-designed buildings and grounds could help to cure patients of their mental ailments.

Though the idea of building-as-cure was discredited at the turn of the 20^th century, the ornate, cupola-topped J Building remains as a visual reminder of the history of mental health care in Oregon.

But the building that was the backdrop to the film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” has fallen into disrepair, and nearly faced demolition in 2008 in conjunction with an ongoing state project to replace the 126-year old hospital.

Now, the J Building is in the process of being restored by Hoffman Construction to house administrative offices, treatment facilities and a mental health museum. But with only 2,500 square feet of space dedicated to the museum, fitting in 126 years of OSH history is going to be a challenge for Kylie Pine. As the museum coordinator, Pine is responsible for sorting through thousands of artifacts saved by hospital staff that will be used to tell the hospital’s hundred-year-long story.

“I have seen everything from electroshock therapy equipment to a bicycle that powers a jigsaw,” Pine said. “It’s going to be a challenge to get the many facets of a complex story into limited square footage.”

The items Pine has come across range from the macabre – Pine can’t bring herself to open an autopsy kit – to the heart wrenching.

“There are cards that list the items a patient brought with them when they arrived at the hospital that were taken away,” Pine said. “Seeing those reminders of what people felt was important to take on this journey is very emotional.”

Once Pine has completed her search through the hospital’s storage, a board of directors for the project will start to put together a storyline for the museum with objects, oral histories and historic documents.

But Dr. Prasanna Pati, who worked at OSH for 28 years, wants more for the museum. He says that the project could be an opportunity for the public to learn not only about the history of mental health at OSH, but about personal mental well being.

“Twenty-five-hundred square feet is hardly any space,” said Pati, who oversees the board of directors for the museum project. “I propose that the state give us Building 40 for the museum complex so there is space for research and education on mental health. We could start a new kind of culture towards mental health with this museum.”

Building 40 currently serves as the construction office for the OSH replacement project and is located across from the J Building. According to OSH museum project board member Hazel Patton, there are no plans yet for the board to pursue acquisition of the building.

“We’re content with the J Building,” Patton said. “It’s the only Kirkbride-designed building left on the West Coast. The state has been very good to us and I’m sure that relationship will continue.”

Patton, Pine and other are in the process of applying for a non-profit charter for the museum, which would open up federal funding opportunities and allow the museum to accept private donations. The paperwork-intensive process to obtain non-profit status can take up to a year, according to Pine.

In the meantime, Pine will continue to sort through rooms full of records, medical equipment and furniture that hold the keys to the hospital’s storied past.

“I found a set of polished silverware the other day,” she said. “It’s interesting to see how life must have changed from patients sitting down to a meal and using silver to what they may be using today.”

Donations for the museum can currently be made to Salem‘s Mission Mill Museum, which preserves Mission houses as well as relics from the Thomas Kay Woolen Mill, one of Oregon’s earliest industries. To follow Pine’s archival process, visit .

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