Owner: Hoag Hospital

Completion Date: August 2010

Program: A 244,000-square-foot acute care and orthopedic specialty hospital composed of a five-story patient bed tower that adjoins a three-level central atrium. The project is a renovation of the Irvine Regional Hospital and Medical Center, a 20-year-old community hospital that was taken over by the Hoag system. A new program, the Hoag Orthopedic Institute, has nine operating rooms on the second floor of the atrium building; it replaces a mother-baby facility, which was absorbed by Hoag Hospital Newport. The Irvine project also includes two additional operating rooms, an 11-bay emergency department, imaging and cardiology services, a physical therapy gym, staff lounges, and a health resource center.

Design concept and solution: Taylor wanted to streamline the interiors of the hospital, improve efficiency for staff by rethinking patient-flow patterns, and unify the project with a design theme inspired by the Irvine community. Throughout the interior, the architects made simplicity their goal. They painted the atrium walls and barrel-vaulted ceiling white. They removed archways overlooking the atrium and replaced them with larger, rectilinear openings to allow more light into the hospital corridors. They also added windows to some of the atrium-facing walls, bringing daylight into rooms that had been walled off, such as a patient-transport area on the second floor. To reduce delays in the operating suites—where pre-op spaces are busiest in the morning, post-op in the afternoon—Taylor built extra post-op units into the pre-op facilities so that doctors can use them for either function depending on the time of day. For the interior finishes, the architects took inspiration from the region's Mountains to Sea Trail, a 22-mile hiking and biking path that runs past the hospital. Laminated glass screens with pressed grasses inside serve as dividers and decorative accents in the lobby, cafeteria, and some patient rooms. Throughout the hospital, life-size photos of trail views invite passersby to pause as though they were encountering a lookout point on the trail itself.

Total construction cost: $30 million

Architect and Interior Designer (Architect of Record):
TAYLOR
2220 University Drive, Newport Beach, California 92660
Phone: 949.574.1325
Fax: 949.574.1338
Web: www.TAA1.com