An interplay of volumes that seem to float animates a hospital's immense scale. In designing a new, 2 million-square-foot facility for Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, the architect HDR + Corgan confronted significant functional and formal challenges.

As in many American cities, large highways slice through downtown Dallas. Sidewalks seem intermittent, parking lots abundant, and locals respond with strange looks when asked the best way to walk to a nearby bar or restaurant. But Dallas is pouring millions of dollars into changing all that.

'Forceful,' 'acrobatic,' 'muscular,' 'raw,' even 'gritty' are usually the operative adjectives to describe the architecture of Thom Mayne (2013 AIA Gold Medalist) and his firm, Morphosis.