Lowell, MA – Levi + Wong Design Associates, Inc. is serving as architects, landscape architects, interior designers, and facility planners for the new D’Youville Center for Advanced Therapy building located on the D’Youville Life and Wellness Community campus.
D’Youville Life and Wellness Community in Lowell serves the area’s elders with dignity and respect. The campus provides adult day health, transitional rehabilitative care, special care dementia services, hospice, long term skilled nursing and independent living apartments.
To keep D’Youville at the forefront of eldercare, the center houses both the D’Youville Center for Advanced Therapy, providing a new home for its short-term transitional rehabilitation and hospice care services, and the New England Rehabilitation Hospital at Lowell, which will provide acute rehabilitation services. This combination ensures the Center’s unique place on the continuum of healthcare.
Unlike most rehabilitation facilities that are retro-fitted into existing structures, Levi + Wong Design’s unique, state of the art, rehabilitative therapy environment primary design philosophy for the Center was based patient centered care and evidenced based design. Using these models, and creating one of the first Leed Silver certifiable buildings in Massachusetts, the Center is organized to facilitate patient recovery, caregiver assistance, and family involvement. The design is highlighted by contemporary, hospitality design aesthetics and amenities.
Levi + Wong Design planned the building’s hillside entrance as a village-style with a residential scale, a chapel’s anchoring stonewall, a colonnade entrance façade, and a bridge terrace overlook. The outdoor rehabilitation courtyards are strategically placed for therapeutic use. The hospice suites each have access to a private courtyard, while the other programs share two outdoor therapy areas.
The building’s shell consists of simple forms like bay windows, warm wood-faced resin panels, grey metal roofing, and retaining walls of regional stonework. The floor-to-ceiling windows serve a dual purpose: to allow natural light to assist in the reduction environmental impacts during the day use, and make the western campus approachable at night.
Significant attention was paid to planning the Center and its interior design. Circulation to the D’Youville Center for Advanced Therapy and New England Rehabilitation Hospital at Lowell, located on separate floors, is centralized through an entrance atrium with a connecting stair. Programming and planning required a functional crucifix floor plan, which was only coincidental to the campus’s religious connections. The interior was further developed around the light-filled entrance atrium from which the healthcare program anchored patient wings rotate.
The Center’s open plan allows for easy circulation throughout, while maintaining patient privacy and dignity. The generous 9’-6’’ corridors with resting areas and even lighting lead to bountiful multipurpose day, dining, occupational therapy and family areas. The open layout of the multipurpose rehabilitation gym’s houses state-of-the-art therapy equipment.
The spacious patient rooms are also permeated with natural light via the large windows. The non clinical appearance is enhanced by the built-in storage, a color palette, the large bathrooms with open showers, built-in vanities, and storage. As dictated by their purpose, the bariatric suites have patient lifts for direct access to toilets and bathing, and the four-room hospice suite ensures situational respectfulness.
Currently registered with the USGBC, the facility has been designed to be LEED 2009 New Construction Silver certifiable. Levi + Wong Design strived to optimize energy performance in the building’s envelope, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical systems. An water source variable flow refrigerant (VFR) heat pump system was selected based on first cost and life-cycle cost comparisons to other mechanical systems. Electrical rebates through the utility company’s lighting program were also obtained.
Working closely with the both the client and construction manager, Cutler Associates, was easier though the use of pre constructing estimating Building Information Modeling. This process ensured that visualizations for quick and easy approvals by D’Youville and NERH, while providing information to Cutler Associates to be able to provide budgeting numbers. The client, construction manager, and our consultants found this process strengthened the design and allowed for better decision-making, a better understanding of each space, and a more streamlined process.
The Center for Advanced Therapy design team contributed to the successful design and ease of construction.
The Center for Advanced Therapy is currently under construction, the topping off ceremony was held on May 20, 2011, and will be completed in fall 2011.
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