Located in Brooklyn’s historic Park Slope neighborhood, the new Community Health Center (CCH), part of New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, is set in the area’s classic brownstone. Responding to the borough’s growing shift toward outpatient healthcare, the new facility signals the hospital’s “commitment to a healthier Brooklyn” by creating a state-of-the-art facility in residents’ own backyards, said company director David Faren. Hospital facilities. Fallon said Brooklynites are taking too long to travel to Manhattan for their health care needs. “Easier access to care will improve community health by enabling patients to diagnose and treat disease early in the disease process,” he said.

The new outpatient facility, located across the street from the existing hospital, also offers the opportunity to move some of the hospital’s services to a new health center, which will free up space to update its aging inpatient facility. Additionally, NewYork-Presbyterian can better serve the community’s outpatient needs, moving services from an aging townhouse used as a doctor’s office to a new 400,000-square-foot facility with 12 outpatient surgical suites; Cancer with Infusion centers; diagnostic imaging centers; and services, including cardiology, digestive care, and orthopedics. “This is an opportunity to provide better quality for patients and staff,” said the hospital’s vice-chancellor, Steven Wright. Perkins Eastman (New York), the company behind architecture and interior design.

In 2012, New York-Presbyterian began planning for a new seven-story project (the facility will be the largest in the borough when it opens in March 2021). But first, the project faced several challenging site constraints, said Cristobal Mayendia, principal at Perkins Eastman (New York). For starters, the required program will require a large facility. However, zoning constraints governing heights, setbacks and building volumes required the design team to come up with variances to accommodate the building volumes needed to meet the plan, Mayendia said. Additionally, the plan needed to accommodate existing buildings on site, including seven townhouses and an open car park. There was also objection from Brooklyn residents, who were concerned that the large medical complex would obscure a smaller nearby brownstone. “The project was met with huge opposition because of the size of the project,” Mayendia said.

With all these issues in mind, the project team set out to create a building that was “community-friendly, meaningful on site, contextually relevant and as welcoming as possible,” he said.

website details
The design team works directly with the community through outreach and regular meetings, providing information to the community itself to inform the design. “We did extensive research on existing structures nearby, trying to understand their details, their shades, colours, [and] materials,” said Mayendia. Through this research, the design team developed a language to guide the building called “Renewal Traditional,” a contemporary style that takes the scale of some traditional structures such as vertical windows, deep shadow lines, Hinged and connecting stripes around the windows.

To accommodate the remaining townhouses, the new building has a U-shaped configuration, with clinical and treatment areas located in the “U”-shaped arms on the west and east sides of the building, and patient waiting areas on the west and east sides of the building. the center of the floor. Then, to help break down the scale of the building, the design team used material variations, details and lines to make the exterior of the outpatient facility appear more like a series of individual blocks than one massive structure. To further reduce the facility’s impact on nearby residential areas, the bulk of the building is concentrated in the middle of the Sixth Street block, then steps down on either side of Eighth Avenue and Fifth Street to reflect the neighborhood’s sloping streets and townhouses scale.

While addressing the overall architectural issues, the project team also held discussions with the community regarding traffic to and from the site. “Originally, the plan was to be able to drive directly onto Fifth Street, but the community was against that idea because they didn’t want any hospital traffic on that road,” Wright said. Mayendia added that residents also objected to plans to have an entrance on Eighth Avenue because they didn’t want the hospital function to face that direction.

The solution, Wright said, was to remove the extra entrance on the Avenue side of the building and instead create a main entrance, called a motor vehicle hall, for pedestrians and motor vehicles on Sixth Street, with cars entering and leaving on this side. In order to make the space feel approachable and not like a garage, the project team decided to turn it into an extension of the central double-height main lobby, covering part of the ceiling with the same warm wood material found in the building, and installing a colorful mosaic near the entrance Mural “The Colors of the Neighborhood”. “[We decided] We’re going to build a beautiful hall, but it’s going to extend to the outside and in a way, it’s going to reach out to the community through this piece,” Mayendia said.

interior features
At the entrance, a spacious lobby welcomes patients and visitors, as well as a café, a patient education center, meeting rooms and a well-lit waiting area on the first floor. The ambassador assists the patient upon arrival by checking them in using a digital kiosk and then directing them to the elevator or turnstile (if connecting to the first floor by stairs), where another ambassador greets them on the destination floor patient.

The lower level of the building, which houses gastrointestinal care and special procedures as well as valet parking, occupies the entire basement.Imaging and pre-admission examinations are located on the first floor, Cardiology and pre- and post-operative examination rooms are located on the third floor, the operating room is located on the fourth floor, the Orthopedics Department is located on the fourth floor, and the Cancer Center and Infusion Room are located on the third floor.
The departments that make up the sixth floor. The seventh floor is dedicated to machinery.

Guided by the client’s request for a refined and timeless approach, the overall concept of the interior design references the use of nature-inspired materials and tones,” said Christina Peters, senior associate interior designer at Perkins Eastman (New York). City Park” theme, and the color and vibrancy of the Park Slope community. Materials include large tile and terrazzo floors in the lobby; wood laminate siding on ceilings, hallway walls and accent walls in clinical areas; and luxury vinyl tiles in key areas such as meeting rooms and community spaces.

Color is primarily presented through furniture and artwork, including works by Brooklyn-based artists, to further connect the facility and the community. “The color palette consists mostly of warm and cool neutrals for base finishes, and the wood tones keep it warm throughout,” Peters said.

evolving environment
In 2016, when New York Methodist Hospital became part of the New York-Presbyterian system, the project underwent a change of ownership. “New York Methodist Hospital has a longstanding relationship with New York-Presbyterian,” Wright said. As a result, the project was put on hold for several months so that the new owner could conduct an audit. This has led to some last-minute program changes, including the addition of a pharmacy to the infusion center on the sixth floor to increase the visibility of the cancer program, and the creation of a dedicated pediatric suite in the surgical area to increase safety and improve the patient experience. “This required us to move some procedural components around the building, such as ancillary services in the operating room, and then create two separate entrances, one for children and one for adults, into the pre-operative and post-operative areas,” Wright said. Next is the completion of a women’s center in the shell space on the fifth floor and part of the third floor.

Despite the challenges, the design team said it was able to provide facilities that met the needs of the client and the community. “It’s a highly modern building with the latest medical technology, but the building fits well into the historic district,”
Mayendia said.

Joann Plockova is a freelance writer working between Jupiter, Florida and Prague, Czech Republic.she can be [email protected].