Omaha, Nebraska, USA
John Andrews, vice president and healthcare practice leader at Leo A. Daly states: “Everything about this project is a love letter to America’s veterans.”
As lead architect, engineer, and interior designer for the project, the firm’s design for this new Omaha Ambulatory Care Center is an interdisciplinary undertaking that showcases a “unique expression of freedom, sacrifice, honor and duty.”
The design features the VA’s Patient Aligned Care Team (PACT) prototype model and includes eight primary care PACT units, one specifically dedicated to women’s healthcare. There is also a specialty care unit and an ambulatory surgery suite.
The building has 157,000 departmental gross square feet allocated in a three-level structure. A connector link to the existing hospital building will separate public-patient traffic patterns from the required service traffic for the new building.
The facility’s design promotes patient-centered environments throughout to focus on the relationship between the physical environment and the patients’ overall experience.
The design creates a healing environment that integrates spaces of escape and refuge, positive distractions, access to views and nature and abundance of natural daylight.
Outside, patients and visitors can take time for reflection in a new healing garden.
Ultimately, the design of the care center draws on patriotic iconography to honor veterans. For example, the primary facade expresses the form of an American flag rippling in the wind. It combines sophisticated structural design with aesthetic composition to depict freedom.
The western façade conveys honor using glass panes of different hues that evoke the ribbons awarded to service members.
Selective limestone walls perform the duty of separating public spaces from secure clinical areas.
The wall’s physical strength embodies security, while the limestone’s sedimentary layers reference periods of peace and conflict through which veterans have served. The stony composition reflects foreign soil tracked home.
The most notable feature of the design is the 120,000-square-foot folded glass curtain “flag wall” that runs the entire length of the building’s north side and creates a sort of undulating effect reminiscent of a flag flapping in the wind.
The center’s kaleidoscopic western facade, clad in polychrome glazed panels, intends to bring a sense of playfulness and light to the affair while also evoking the colorful ribbon bars that don the uniforms of military personnel.
In addition to the clinics and services housed within the center, the facility also features an outdoor healing garden, a new ground-level connecting corridor to the existing 12-story hospital that’s clad in stained glass, and a plethora of specially commissioned art, much of it created by veteran-artists.
Architects: Leo A. Daley
Client: Veterans Ambulatory Center Development Corporation
Photographers: AJ Brown Photography
