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The Vascular Institute
By Barry A. Muskat; photos by kc kratt
Dr. Leo “Nick” Nelson Hopkins, is internationally respected in his field. Professor and chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery and professor of Radiology at UB, he is described by his medical contemporaries as “the real deal.” Although he’s slow to take any credit, the latest buzz is that the Vascular Institute now under construction at the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus is his baby.
To plan the multidisciplinary center, he gathered together a number of leaders in different vascular specialties—cardiology, vascular surgery, radiology, neurosurgery, and vascular medicine. The group spent several days brainstorming with Mehrdad Yazdani of Cannon and Yazdani Studio (the architect who did the award-winning Hauptmann-Woodward building), discussing how each discipline approaches the minimally invasive treatment of vascular disease.
The resulting architecture is structured to bring the disciplines together in a working relationship, because, as Hopkins explains, “By and large it’s all the same disease in different organs of the body—but all of the vascular system.” By bringing the disciplines together in the same building by forcing the scientists, for example, to work with the clinicians who work on the vascular system—synergies will be found. He quotes the architect’s observation at those initial meetings, “Clearly, you guys want collisions from different disciplines…you just want to collide.” As it turns out, that became the major underlying principal in designing the new Vascular Institute.
Another focus came from the realization that though this building centers on minimally invasive procedures, other treatment paradigms for the disease will evolve over time. The building was made to be flexible, and somewhat modular, so that the structure itself can evolve with new technology. Hopkins summarizes, “The key is collisions, leading to collaboration, leading to innovation in medicine.”
Structurally, the first four floors of the building will house the Vascular Institute. The fifth floor is the Jacobs Institute (the Center for Collaboration and Innovation), named for the late Dr. Larry Jacobs, a vascular specialist who discovered a treatment for multiple sclerosis. The upper floors will house the University Translational Research Center. The Jacobs Institute is designed as the center to bring everyone—hospital, university, physicians, and the community at large—together to manage and encourage interaction and collaboration. (The Jacobs family, as well as Kaleida, UB, and the Berger commission, made the building financially possible.)
Architect Yazdani sees the building as unique because it provides combined housing for functions that are normally housed in separate structures—and the dynamic exterior of the building reflects what goes on inside. There are two skin systems. Along the north and south façades (the south faces the existing hospital), there’s a fritted white glass and metal system that wraps the entire structure. (Fritted glass in this case is a dotted pattern on the glass whose density changes from very open to very dense.) The ribbon of glass weaves around the building, highlighting the important common spaces. Along the east and west sides of the building, there’s a mostly glass façade that combines transparent, translucent, and spandrel treatments. Vertical aluminum blinds provide shading. In many conventional buildings, all four sides have the same treatment. Here, because of the huge mass of the Institute, Yazdani treated the adjacent sides of the building differently to create an appealing break in the visual mass.
The enormous floor plates (50,000 square feet per floor) and structural column grid of the building allow flexibility for the next 100 years. As medicine advances, any floor can be converted to other functions (e.g., if there’s less demand for patient rooms, floors could be converted to surgical or laboratory spaces).
The exterior envelope of the building will be completed by early spring. Doors are scheduled to open in November 2011. Yazdani notes, “What we were able to achieve here is what a lot of institutions in the United States want to build.” Hopkins similarly states, “People from all over the country are blown away when they see this. Leaders from some of the most well-known hospital systems in the country have come to look at the design saying things like ‘This would be incredible, even for New York City!’”
From the early stages of the design, Yazdani has described his building as a club sandwich. He explains the analogy this way: “It has the various layers, and each layer is different, independent and unique to itself. You only get the true flavor when you bite into the whole sandwich.”
Barry A. Muskat is Spree’s architecture critic and a frequent contributor.
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