Page 89 - ArchDC_Winter2017

ArchDC Winter 2017.qxp_Fall 2017 11/17/17 5:58 PM Page 87
Presidential Citation for Design & Wellbeing

Children’s Hospital
of Richmond Pavilion
Richmond, VA
HKS, Inc.

Landscape Architects: Mahan Rykiel Associates
Structural Engineers: Dunbar, Milby, Williams, Pittman & Vaughan
MEP Engineers: ccrd
General Contractor: Skanska

With its inviting street-level colonnade, elegant glass curtain wall,
and lushly planted rooftop terrace, the sleek modern building
directly across the street from Richmond’s historic City Hall—and
on axis with the State Capitol beyond—could easily be mistaken
for a luxury hotel or high-end corporate office building. In fact, it
is a new comprehensive children’s medical facility born out of the
Exterior of the Children’s Hospital Richmond Pavilion.
consolidation of several outdated pediatric clinics. It has also proved
to be an instant landmark, bringing a welcome jolt of architectural glassy upper levels, appropriately enough, are associated with
energy to the rather nondescript campus of the Virginia water and the sky.
Commonwealth University Health System. The architects employed other design strategies aimed at
“The vision for the Children’s Pavilion is to create an oasis for producing a calm healing environment, ranging from the tried-
sick and injured children,” stated the architects at HKS, Inc. Their and-true to the extraordinary. In the former category are bright,
strategy for achieving that began at the conceptual level. The form of cheerful colors on walls and furniture and abundant windows to
the building, which consists of an inset ground floor, a boxy, three- admit natural light. More unusual are the interactive digital displays
story garage podium, the “Sky Garden” terrace, and finally a gently that add a sense of liveliness and playfulness and, not incidentally,
faceted glass tower, drew inspiration from the natural geography help to distract young patients from their ailments. The three-story
of the region. The ground floor, with its open loggia, represents atrium at the southeast corner of the building is precisely the sort of
the path through the forest, which is abstractly expressed in the exhilarating interior urban space that, were it not part of a hospital,
vertically striated façades of the garage podium. The Sky would likely be filled with laptop-toting, coffee-sipping patrons
Garden level, which also contains the main hospital lobby seeking a pleasant place to while away the hours. As it is, the atrium
and registration, is intended to evoke the upper is a welcome amenity that surely goes a long way toward comforting
canopy of trees in the forest. The blue-tinged, sick children and their loved ones.

Sky Garden terrace of the
Children’s Hospital Richmond Pavilion.

Photos © Garrett Rowland

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