home
subscribe
free e-newsletter free e-newsletter
reader service
widget
advertise
Subscribe to Architectural Record today
and save 60% off the newsstand price.
Photo © Anshen+Allen, a part of Stantec Architecture

Santa Clara Valley Specialty and Health Centers

Anshen + Allen, Architects

County of Santa Clara, California

share:
print email comment
rate this project:
text size: A A

Client: Santa Clara Valley Health and Hospital System

Completion Date:
July 2010 (Valley Health Center, Milpitas)
May 2009 (Valley Health Center, Sunnyvale)
May 2008 (Valley Health Center, Gilroy)
February 2009 (Valley Specialty Center)

Program: Four public outpatient clinics for the Santa Clara County health-care system, serving county employees and the uninsured. The buildings include the six-story, 244,000-square-foot Valley Specialty Center, a multispecialty clinic on the San Jose hospital campus, along with three primary-care clinics: a 59,074-square-foot two-story facility in the town of Gilroy; a 44,722-square-foot three-story in Sunnyvale; and a 62,532-square-foot three-story in Milpitas.

Design Concept and Solution: Designing the four buildings simultaneously, the Anshen + Allen team wanted to devise a format both replicable and flexible, to allow the clinics to move services around without remodeling. Three of the four buildings were constructed simultaneously, so that the owner could take advantage of cost savings. The organizing unit of all the clinics is a module that consists of two side-by-side clinics, each containing exam rooms, a nurse station, physician offices, and support spaces. With exam rooms and support spaces that are nearly identical, each clinic can borrow rooms from its neighbor to accommodate fluctuating numbers of patients. The rooms, too, are fractions or multiples of each other, so that two exam rooms can be repurposed as a procedure room, for example. This interchangeability also allows entire medical functions to move to a different module—or a new floor—allowing the clinics to expand or shrink services according to demand. To free the modules of structural supports that would interfere with such flexibility, the architects organized columns around the modules and used moment frames to keep braces and shear walls out of the plan. They extended their kit-of-parts approach to the building materials, using curtainwalls along the buildings' public corridors and enclosing the private treatment areas and physician offices with precast concrete cladding and an aluminum ribbon window system.

Total construction cost:
$38.2 million (Valley Health Center, Milpitas)
$29.1 million (Valley Health Center, Sunnyvale)
$35.7 million (Valley Health Center, Gilroy)
$96 million (Valley Specialty Center)

Gross square footage:
44,722 sq.ft. (Valley Health Center, Sunnyvale)
62,532 sq.ft. (Valley Health Center, Milpitas)
59,074 sq.ft. (Valley Health Center, Gilroy)
244,000 sq.ft. (Valley Specialty Center)

Architect:
Anshen + Allen, Architects
901 Market Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
415.882.9500
415.882.9523

October 2010
 Reader Comments:

Sign in to Comment

To write a comment about this story, please sign in. If this is your first time commenting on this site, you will be required to fill out a brief registration form. Your public username will be the beginning of the email address that you enter into the form (everything before the @ symbol). Other than that, none of the information that you enter will be publically displayed.

We welcome comments from all points of view. Off-topic or abusive comments, however, will be removed at the editors’ discretion.
----- Advertising -----
----- Advertising -----
Video
View all
Reader Feedback
Most Commented Most Recommended
Rankings reflect comments made in the past 14 days
Rankings reflect comments made in the past 14 days
Recently Posted Reader Photos
View all photo galleries
Architectural Record in print
Subscribe to Architectural Record