Surgery Center Comes to Scottsdale

by K. Robert Wendel

Today's health consumers are better educated, thanks to the Internet, and have more choices than ever before. One of the latest choices for patients in Maricopa County is the $10 million Greenbaum Surgery Center in Scottsdale, which features high-tech surgical suites specially designed to handle minimally invasive operations such as endoscopy, spinal surgery and plastic surgery.

Phoenix-based Wespac Construction is the general contractor.

The 60,000-sq.-ft. hospital, which sits on a slab-on-grade, features 10 operating rooms, two special procedure rooms and three pain-management rooms and administration on the first floor.

A second floor houses 26 patient rooms, including two "VIP" rooms, along with staff lounges and a meeting room. All of the meeting rooms, along with the lobby, can be reconfigured as classrooms with full video and audio capability.

The special-procedure rooms use a high-tech, laminar flow heating and cooling system that moves air from one side of the surgical suite to another, rather than relying on registers in the ceiling. The system helps to maintain the sterile environment of the operating rooms.

"It's a really specialized system specifically for operating rooms," said Ron Ensley, Wespac Construction project manager. "Instead of coming down from the ceiling, which can bring particles down, it comes from a wall and moves across the room. It keeps the surgical suite highly sterile."

Four roof top units supply a total of 275 tons of conditioned air for the hospital, with crews from Phoenix-based Midstate Mechanical performing that division of work.

"This job was very time consuming and heavily coordinated to get together, and not just on the mechanical side," said John Haug, vice president of marketing and sales for Midstate Mechanical. "There is so much stuff that goes between the floor, so we have electrical and medical gas and the plenum just packed in there."

One of the challenges facing architects and designers was creating a building design that would complement the project's location in old town Scottsdale. City planners wanted to maintain the architectural vocabulary of the area, which precluded the construction of a taller building. "Being in downtown Scottsdale was a huge force behind the design. The biggest challenge was how to make a downtown Scottsdale storefront without any storefront," said Marie Segura, an architect with Phoenix-based Orcutt/Winslow Partnership. "We tried to blend it in with old town, and that is why we used a lot of brick. They also wanted to see arches, which we did."

The project's difficult siting led designers to realign the man drive into the campus, creating a gateway to the hospital. The problem facing designers was providing natural light into patient rooms, many of which ended up on the east and west sides of the building.

"There were huge concerns on how to get the windows into the patient rooms without killing them in the morning and afternoon," Segura said. "We found a way to orient the rooms to look toward the north. It worked out great because we ended up with beautiful framed view of the Camelback and McDowell Mountains."

Constructed with a steel skeleton, the project features an extensive use of brick and block throughout. Designers created the building around a central mechanical well because the site lacked an alley to place much of the mechanical units.

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