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Creating a Colossal Campus
Architect discusses his firm's role in the planning of the
Kaiser Permanente medical center in Downey.
By Paul Napolitano
The 900,000-sq.-ft. medical center being built in Downey
by Kaiser Permanente is one of three major components on a
65-acre site. A 450,000-sq.-ft. retail center and a 1.1- million-sq.-ft.
studio are the others.
The massive medical center, which reached the construction
phase earlier this year, contains several separate structures
that reach an apex in the middle of the campus.
"We try to mass our buildings so the taller elements
are centralized," said Bob Kain, AIA, chairman of the
board and director of health care for project architect Ontario-based
HMC. "As you get near the edge, where you have pedestrians
or maybe adjacent residential or low-rise (buildings), we
try to stack down vertically to two- and three-story buildings."
The six-story patient-care tower on the south side of the
site is the tallest building on the 30-acre Kaiser campus.
Kain described the 567,000-sq.-ft. tower as "a crest"
in the center of the campus.
There will be two medical office buildings-each about 300,000
sq. ft. One will be four-stories tall, the other three. One
MOB is part of the current first phase of construction. The
other will be built at a time to be determined by Kaiser,
Kain said.
The Kaiser complex will have three street frontages. It faces
heavily traveled Imperial Highway, but a new internal roadway
that will function as the primary public entrance will queue
vehicles off the main streets.
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The massive medical
center, which reached the construction phase earlier
this year, contains several separate structures that
reach an apex in the middle of the campus (rendering
courtesy of HMC).
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"The really important thing here is that this piece
of land is contiguous with an existing 300,000-sq.-ft. outpatient
clinic, a three-story medical office building (the Kaiser-owned
Imperial Clinic, built in the 1970s) that has been established
in that community for some time," Kain said. "Rather
than picking a piece of land a couple of blocks away, we now
have a critical mass of a 600,000-sq.-ft. hospital and almost
600,000 sq., ft. of medical office buildings."
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