Advocate Lutheran General Hospital Center for Advanced Care in Park Ridge, Ill., was designed by OWP/P.

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You won’t be able to pick out an OWP/P-designed healthcare project just by looking at the architecture, and that’s exactly the way the firm wants it. Design Principal Randy Guillot says the design firm doesn’t have a house style for healthcare projects, but chooses instead to work with clients to find the best solutions for their facilities. “Our practice is extremely collaborative in nature,” he says.

Although most design firms can claim to be directly involved with clients, OWP/P takes it to heart and creates spaces that work as practical places for healthcare as well as expressions of clients’ cultures. “It’s more than window dressing; it’s really truly understanding the business of our clients and redefining how they do their business,” Guillot says. “We have a focus on the complete environment.”

To hone the firm’s focus, Guillot says employees spend a lot of time in a healthcare environment before ever putting pencil to paper. OWP/P can apply its experience in other sectors to healthcare, which helps because healthcare is the “most challenging market that we’re in today,” Guillot says.

OWP/P has been a force in architecture and interior design since the late 1950s, and has offices in Chicago and Phoenix. The firm has been working in the healthcare sector since 1968, when it designed Lake Forest Hospital in Lake Forest, Ill. The firm also designs projects in the education, corporate and commercial sectors.

A Sense of Place
The most important aspect of design, especially in healthcare facilities, is to create a building with its own unique character and that doesn’t feel generic, Guillot says. “Our approach to work tries to connect people to place,” he says. “I think every one of our designs is individual. They all represent where they are in the world, and are not cookie-cutter designs.”

OWP/P achieves this through shadowing, Guillot adds. “It’s important that a problem be well-framed before it can be well-solved,” he says. “We want to know what [the client’s] priorities are and how they work, and the best way to do that is to put yourself in an emergency room for 24 hours.”

Before the firm’s employees get started on any healthcare project, they spend time getting to know the ins and outs of a similar facility, watching for how the facility’s processes and procedures work in relation to their space. “We see things that our clients don’t,” Guillot says. “Part of the reason why they hire us is our understanding of the interrelationships of lots of things. Our job is to see the relationship between at times seemingly unrelated things.”

For example, he says, the firm has designed facilities with a third corridor for service traffic through patient areas, which keeps noisier traffic “off-stage.” Guillot says the idea came about as its designers were watching hospital traffic for ways to cut down on noise that could disturb patients.

Access to natural light is another way OWP/P creates a feeling of place in its projects. “Every project has a fundamental right to access to the outside,” Guillot says.

Also, designing healthcare spaces that are adaptable to patients’ and caregivers’ needs has become a top priority for many clients. “We are certainly on the leading edge of designing flexible clinical space, be that working with OR modules or individual patient modules,” he says.

Parts of the Whole
OWP/P’s approach is beginning to gain traction in the healthcare sector, Guillot says, as caregivers begin to understand how all the different segments of their operations mesh together and work as a whole.

“I think now you have a much more aware client population that is sourcing the best designers in the industry to bring together culturally and physically what used to be the disparate parts of the puzzle,” he says. “I see a real focus on quality of space. By quality I don’t mean expensive space, but real thoughtful design of space.”

An example of how this is put into practice is the firm’s work on the OSF St. Francis Medical Center and Children’s Hospital of Illinois in Peoria, Ill. The project is adding 440,000 square feet of new space and 35,000 square feet of renovation to the facility, which is expected to be completed in 2010.

Guillot says the firm took a collaborative approach to the project, not only between it and the client, but also among the client’s different departments. “We created a design process that brings together in the room all the constituents from all the different [departments] so they all understand the needs of each other,” he says.

Guillot says the project has been arranged in a “vertical community” that provides access to almost all components of the campus from anywhere else in the building. The design also allows for flexibility when future expansions are made to the facility. “Suffice to say that you’re considering all of the pieces in terms of one whole at the end of the day,” Guillot says.

The OSF St. Francis Medical Center project incorporates some other innovative ideas from an operational standpoint, he adds. The hospital uses a pod concept in its new emergency rooms, which separates clinical traffic from patients to improve patient safety.

Such a design is rare, but Guillot says a growing number of clients are working new ideas into their facilities. “We’re seeing a lot of very innovative ER department design work,” he says.

Guillot says he expects OWP/P to continue helping clients reinvent their processes through architecture and design, and that the firm’s approach will continue to be the driver. “I see us continuing to evolve this idea of a more complex definition of what design is, one that truly understands our clients’ business,” he says. “To do that, you do have to lift your head up from the desk.”