Legacy of Light, Inspired Integration

Last year, Bayhealth Hospital opened its 440,000-square-foot Sussex Campus to patients in Milford, DE, a rapidly growing seaside community. The healthcare provider’s prior downtown site was landlocked, prohibiting growth. By moving to the 165-acre greenfields site, the hospital gained seven times more space than its previous 22-acre location.

The six-story facility includes a large emergency and trauma center three times the size of the old emergency department. The hospital contains 128 private patient rooms, each with ample space for visitors and substantive views to the outdoors. In addition, the hospital also incorporates an impressive 70,000-square-foot outpatient center that houses a cancer center, rehab services, surgery and more.

With a tight schedule and budget, the hospital was designed and delivered three months earlier than comparable healthcare projects, via an integrated project delivery (IPD) approach. Architectural firm CannonDesign Chicago partnered with construction management company Whiting Turner to reduce waste and redundancies in the design process.

Quoted in the Delaware Business Times, Troy Hoggard, CannonDesign’s lead designer on the project and a ““self-described IPD evangelist” [said that] in the typical model the architect is “trying to make it bigger and more expensive, and the contractor is trying to make it smaller and less expensive… We’ve figured out the better way to deliver a project is to have the owner, builder and designer work together[.]”

Mike Metzing, Vice President of Corporate Support Services for Bayhealth agreed: ““We’re incentivizing people to always do the right thing, to work with us and save money,” he said.”

As a single-source solution vendor, McGrory Glass was able to provide nearly 400 pieces of glass, including laminated glass with a custom white gradient interlayer, x-ray and radiation-shielding glass, fire-rated glass, and all-glass entrances and office fronts. The McGrory team also supplied glass walls and partitions across the facility, in the nursing stations, emergency department, registration area, conference and waiting rooms, meditation area, and the community room.

In addition, the team fabricated the building’s structural glass railings with SGP-compatible films with custom white gradient that matched the rest of the hospital’s interior.

“McGrory can manufacture structural glass with nearly limitless interlaid, decorative aesthetics,” says John Clark, Regional Architectural Sales Manager at McGrory. “That’s how we were able to tie in the glass railings to the rest of the building glass design.”

The overall design inspiration was southern Delaware’s natural landscape of cornfields and proximity to the ocean. Patients and visitors can view wave-like ripples on the exterior façade and on wood features throughout the interiors to echo nature’s healing properties.

“The project was a tremendous success because the team was such a success,” said Metzing. “The new campus is state of the art, delivered on time and on budget. … The result: A legacy project designed and built to serve the healthcare needs of the people of central and southern Delaware for decades to come.”

The Healthy Case for (Lots) of Natural Light

Architects know that healthcare design is changing, as institutions adopt a more welcoming, human-centric approach that empowers and comforts patients. Patients with more access to natural light feel exponentially better and experience shorter hospital stays than those who don’t, according to an Environ Health Insights article. Natural light also bolsters employee satisfaction, leading to improved patient experiences.

McGrory provided cohesive laminated glass panels with custom white gradients that appear throughout Bayhealth Hospital. Besides promoting daylight, the opaque gradients offer privacy for patients and their families.

“Glass does a fantastic job of filtering natural light through a space,” Clark says. “The white gradients allow for a transparent portion at the top of the glass panel that promotes natural light penetration, but provides opacity and privacy toward the bottom. Our in-house-printed glass interlayers gave the designer absolute control over the opacity of the privacy portion, as well as the specific heights of the white gradient print. Each area required glass panels with specific opacities and gradient dimensions.”

With updated Federal HIPAA Privacy Rule standards, controlling opacity is a must. Custom glass solutions help balance the need for doctor-to-patient privacy and family/ visitor discretion with the current evidence-based emphasis on natural light.

The ultimate result? A stunning building that included McGrory Glass’ decorative glass; structural architectural  glass; and performance products.

“CannonDesign gave us the opportunity to use all of our capabilities, from doors and entrances, side lites, office fronts and partitions to railings, radiation-shielding glass and fire-rated glazing,” Clark says. “And that’s what we do — provide cohesive glass solutions for entire buildings.”

Award-Winning Design

At the end of last year, the CannonDesign team was awarded the inaugural Exceptional Detail Award at the 2019 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Baltimore Excellence in Design Awards:

“The award focused on how the new hospital reflects its surroundings: the natural landscape of southern Delaware, particularly the coastal features… Also highlighted were the amount of natural green spaces on the campus for patient and staff use, as well as the interior’s “element of warmth and elegance not often found in healthcare environments… and references the natural world in what otherwise could be a sterile and clinical space.””