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From grand plans to the smallest details, the new Nationwide Children’s Hospital was designed to be an optimal healing environment for families
PHOTOS BY WILL SHILLING
Abigail Wexner and Dr. Steve Allen walked through the atrium of the new main hospital at Nationwide Children’s. It was April 26, just
55 days from June 20 when patients will move into every level of the 12-story, 750,000-square-foot building.
The neon-green fiberglass and foam limbs of a tree as long as a tractor-trailer lay on the floor. Construction workers in hard hats raced past. Outside, in a chilly mist, real honey locust trees were being transplanted into the six-acre “front lawn.” Wexner, chair of Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s board of directors, and Allen, its president and chief executive officer, discussed atrium features yet to be installed.
“Up there,” Allen pointed to one wall, “speakers for the soundscape.”
“They’ll play different natural sounds throughout the day and night,” Wexner added.
They rounded a corner toward a corridor still blanketed with tarp covers.
“Now, this,” Wexner said, beginning to smile, “the real story behind this is that it really wasn’t...”
“Oh, no,” Allen laughed, “it was all planned.”
“It was not planned at all,” Wexner said, and they began poking at corners of the tarp to find a spot where they could peek into a Magic Forest.
For every small, carefully considered detail of this $782 million campus-expansion project, there is some small satisfaction that comes from knowing the one element that may best represent this project was not in the original blueprints. The LED-lit headwalls above patient beds whose Aurora borealis-like glow can be seen from miles away and the Emergency Department trauma bays that enable parents to remain with their children during treatment were years in the making. So were the animation videos of woodland creatures projected on walls and terrazzo floors whose sparkle draws the eye to the “wayfinding” paths embedded in the floor.
But this magical element took shape only about a year ago.
“We were sitting there saying, ‘We have this odd space between the [existing] building and the new building,’ ” Wexner recalled, as she and Allen finally found an opening in the tarp. They stepped through to a towering space where the neon-green trees stood upright, where turtles parachuted and caterpillars hulu-hooped on the walls, where chairs would be installed for parents to sit on, sip a coffee from a nearby café and watch as children climb through a two-hole burrow in the wall.
“We said it seemed like such a waste,” Wexner said, “and we need to do something with it.”
MAKING MAGIC
The artists at LifeFormations are more used to installing their creations in amusement parks and science centers. Sending giant tendrils of tree limbs through the ceiling of a children’s hospital is a first for this Bowling Green company. So is rigging a tree with cuckoo clocks that will play music at regular intervals.
“Usually you see something this unique in a tourist destination,” said Jeff Krouse, LifeFormations’ assistant project coordinator.
The goal for this massive undertaking is no different than what drives any children’s healthcare organization—to provide children in the region with health care so excellent, they and their families don’t have to leave the area to find it.
How this goal is being achieved is what promises to make the Nationwide Children’s expansion unique, even among its peers. The institution will rank fourth largest in the country with nearly 1 million patient visits expected in 2012. It will rise to No. 2 for size as measured by beds, with 552.
Additionally, this 120-year-old institution is nationally ranked in 10 pediatric specialties, ranging from cancer to orthopedics. And Nationwide Children’s research efforts have vaulted the organization into the ranks of Top 10 pediatric research institutes, as measured by National Institutes of Health funding.
The campus-expansion plans called for a new main hospital, energy plant, employee parking garage and world-class research facilities.
The project started with a stroke of luck—if a global recession can be called that. Fundraising was well on its way to reaching the goal of $250 million before the economy turned sour. To date, a little more than $300 million has been raised.
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