Levi + Wong Design Associates, Inc. is serving as architects, landscape architects, interior designers, and planners for the new D'Youville Center for Advanced Therapy building on the D'Youville Life and Wellness Community's campus.
D'Youville Life and Wellness Community serves elders while providing adult day health, transitional rehabilitative care, dementia care, hospice, long term skilled nursing, and independent living apartments. The building 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 (NERH) 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 philosophy was based patient centered care and evidenced based design. Using these models, and creating one of the first LEED Silver certifiable healthcare buildings in Mass., the center is organized to facilitate patient recovery, caregiver assistance, and family involvement while highlighting contemporary, hospitality design aesthetics and amenities.
The center's exterior has a village-style hillside entry, a chapel's anchoring stonewall, a colonnade façade, and a bridge terrace overlook. The outdoor ADL rehabilitation courtyards are placed for therapeutic use while the hospice suites each have a private courtyard. The 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 in therapy spaces serve to allow natural light to reduce environmental impacts during the day, and to make the western campus visible and approachable at night.
Significant attention was paid to the interior design and layout. Circulation to the D'Youville Center for Advanced Therapy and New England Rehabilitation Hospital at Lowell, located on separate floors, is centralized by an entrance atrium with a connecting stair. The interior was developed around the light-filled atrium from which the patient wings rotate. Programming and planning required a functional crucifix floor plan, which was coincidental to the campus's religious connections.
The center's open plan allows for easy circulation, while maintaining patient privacy. The wide 9'-6'' corridors with seating areas and even lighting lead to multipurpose, dining, occupational therapy, and family areas. The multipurpose rehabilitation gym houses new equipment.
The patient rooms' windows, built-in storage, color palette, and large bathrooms enhance the non-clinical appearance. As dictated by their purpose, the bariatric suites have patient lifts for direct access to toilets and bathing, and the four-room hospice suite.
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. A water source variable flow refrigerant (VFR) heat pump system was selected based on first cost and life-cycle cost. Electrical rebates through the utility company's lighting program were obtained.
Working with the client and construction manager, Cutler Associates, was easier through using pre-constructing services, estimating and Building Information Modeling. This ensured that visualizations were available for approvals by D'Youville and NERH, while providing information to Cutler to provide budgeting numbers. The client, construction manager, and our consultants found this method strengthened the design, enhanced decision-making, and streamlined the process.
The project is on schedule to be completed later this year.