Creating The Footprint for a Modern High Rise

A Video Series on the Presbyterian Hospital New Tower Addition: Part 2

[Video Transcription]

Clearing the Slate

The new tower at Presbyterian Hospital was really the culmination of many years of earlier projects that went into the campus. It's in a really urban environment and it had a lot of elements that needed addressing over the years.

Clearing the slate and creating that blank area for us to build the new tower was absolutely a unique aspect to this project.

We realigned the entry into the campus. That was one of our initial elements, the streamlined access to the Emergency Department and make it easier for public and patients and everyone else to arrive at the campus.

Increasing Parking

We also increased the parking on the site, but the parking had always been a little bit difficult down there because of its urban environment, and so we had to really add parking in order to support the new tower.

And after that we had some infrastructure elements that needed to be addressed in order to create the blank space we were going to need for the new tower. In order to create that, we really had to remove and relocate most of the infrastructure and utilities that ran in and fed the existing hospital.

Once the utilities and infrastructure had been relocated, we then had to deal with the many years of existing buildings. Some of the buildings in the area, that we were planning to build the tower, dated back to the 1960s and even earlier. So, careful coordination and consideration had to be thought through on the entire process of removing those buildings and creating the new footprint and creating that space for us to build the new tower.

Streamlining Connectivity

One of the major challenges we faced was connectivity. We really needed to create a new tower that would sync up and work with the existing campus. The original tower, B & C towers that are at the campus currently have a 12 foot, floor-to-floor height and the new tower, in a modern healthcare facility, typically would have something more like a 15 foot, floor-to-floor and that's because of all the technology that really goes into health care facilities these days. Ultimately, the design that we landed with was a 12 foot, floor-to-floor height. And what that allowed us to do was create a pedestrian bridge that aligns with the existing tower. This allows the Code Blue teams to basically have direct access to our new tower and be able to reach a patient that’s in distress.