WRNS Studio was tasked with completing the El Camino Health Integrated Medical Sobrato Pavilion in Mountain View, California.

The 230,000 square foot, 7 story building will replace the existing “North Addition” with a new multi-disciplinary outpatient center and medical office building. The project will also include much needed additional parking. A new parking structure is proposed as part of an overall campus strategy to provide adequate physician, staff and patient parking in close proximity to where it is needed. The proposed 4 level garage will include approximately 352 parking stalls.

The new Integrated Medical Office Building (IMOB) will be a dedicated destination for outpatient services, with a seamless connection to the new hospital. Other drivers of the IMOB include the desire to form Centers of Excellence in the areas of Cancer, Heart & Vascular and Neurosciences, the need to create physician medical office capacity, freeing space for expansion within the Women’s Hospital, and to provide additional medical office capacity based on current and projected future physician demand and developing partnerships with providers and research institutions. It is also necessary to demolish the 50 plus year-old Old Main Hospital building, which does not meet current seismic safety standards, is highly inefficient, costly to maintain and largely vacant.

The Building is organized to connect both visually and functionally to the existing New Main Hospital while creating a welcoming and easily identifiable western entry off Hospital Drive. The lower floors (G,1,2) form a pedestal similar in scale to the lobby pedestal of the adjacent New Main Hospital. These floors will house outpatient hospital-based procedures and support staff. The shape of the middle floors (3-4) is arranged to relate in scale to the Women’s Hospital to the north. The upper floors (5-6) form a linear tower oriented to maximize energy efficiency. The placement of the parking garage to the south forms a generous entry court on Hospital Drive, providing a sense of arrival for patients visiting the medical offices.

The IMOB will stitch together existing architectural and landscape features from the area into a design that is clean, elegant, and sympathetic to the park-like character of the campus. The MOB tower borrows the material palette of the New Main Hospital—colored concrete panels, warm grey metal mullions, and clear glass—while adjusting the pattern of fenestration to a finer grain suitable for an office planning module. The resulting pattern of double-high bays creates a subtle but dynamic vertical texture catching the sunlight at different times of the day. The garage volume, modestly clad in a warm grey metal scrim, forms a quiet background element to the forested landscape foreground. The tower and garage are contained within a series of smaller volumes and site walls clad in a combination of zinc, brick and board-formed concrete. The use of these more richly textured natural materials aim to ground the larger building masses into the pedestrian scaled realm of sidewalk and landscape.

Design: WRNS Studio
Design Team: John Ruffo, Bryan Shiles, Tim Morshead, Beth Radovanovich, Andy Adams, Crispin Lazarit, Dale Diener, Mi Ju Kang
Photography: courtesy of WRNS Studio