commentPeterborough Regional Health Centre
BusinessWeek/Architectural Record Awards Winner
When Michael Moxam, design director at the Toronto office of Stantec Architecture, discusses the new Regional Health Centre in Peterborough, 78 miles northeast of Ontario’s capital, he talks about transitions — how individual rooms connect to the circulation space, which then leads to the front entrance, the city, and the landscape beyond. Sited on Peterborough’s second-highest elevation, the hospital overlooks the town of about 75,000. “There are a lot of layered hills and rock outcroppings,” Moxam says. “It’s where the agrarian south of Ontario meets the stony Canadian Shield.” The 700,000-square-foot hospital, which opened in June 2008, combined the city’s two existing hospitals into a single building, encompassing 500 beds with facilities for surgery, intensive care, emergency care, ambulatory care, and support services.
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A hospital’s main business objective, of course, is to function efficiently. Along those lines, the hospital and architects worked together to create planning committees for different departments, spurring solutions such as organizing patient beds around central cores while still giving the rooms access to daylight and views. The building’s materials were from local sources, when possible, and sustainable measures (high-efficiency windows, green roofing, low-flow plumbing) reduce energy usage by 28 percent over baseline figures.
Those measures, however, are not what most take away from the building. Moxam says that in postoccupancy interviews, doctors and personnel point to the improved surgical theaters and enhanced staff models, “but somehow they always come back to natural light and views outside and the quality of the work space.” Canada’s public-health system mandates that projects like this one be funded through federal-local partnerships; in this case, the health ministry covered 70 percent of the cost, and the community funded the rest. With this partnership in mind, Stantec’s design revolved around the idea of bringing the community into the building, and it seems to have worked: Residents often come to its rooftop terrace café, even when they don’t need medical care.
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