Boone Hospital Center
Columbia, Missouri, United States
Client: Boone Hospital Center (BJC HealthCare)
Parsons Brinckerhoff Role: Design
In 2007, Boone Hospital embarked on the largest expansion in its history as it implemented a $125 million master plan addressing in-patient care needs for the foreseeable future. The centerpiece of the expansion was a new 247,500-square-foot (22,990-square-meter) patient tower that provides the hospital with 32 intensive-care beds and 160 medical/surgical beds on seven levels. Parsons Brinckerhoff was responsible for preparing the site master plan and landscape design for the tower and an adjacent healing garden.
Additional parking needs were addressed by constructing a new 940-vehicle parking structure connected to the patient tower by an enclosed pedestrian walkway. Parsons Brinckerhoff provided full architectural/engineering (A/E) design services for the garage and the walkway. The firm also completed other projects, including the streetscape design of two streets that serve the hospital—William Street and Bass Avenue—and the site plan, master plan, architectural, and engineering design for a new oxygen tank storage facility. Under a separate contract, Parsons Brinckerhoff prepared a site master plan for the 23.7-acre (9.6-hectare) Boone Hospital Medical Park and designed a four-level garage that accommodates 475 vehicles.
While the new patient tower and healing garden are the centerpieces of the Boone Hospital Center master plan, a critical element of the complex is the 223,000-square-foot (20,720-square-meter) William Street parking structure designed by Parsons Brinckerhoff on a 2.5-acre (1-hectare) site. Parsons Brinckerhoff was responsible for the A/E design of the structure, the site roadway conceptual layout, and the conceptual, preliminary and final design of all walkways, lighting, signage, walls, site furnishings, and plantings. Parsons Brinckerhoff kept the garage design phase on schedule by moving from concept to construction documents in just 4 months.
The facilities personnel at Boone Hospital Center had mandated that the garage be an easy drive for elderly or nervous patients and visitors. To meet this mandate, Parsons Brinckerhoff evaluated 12 ramping schemes before selecting a five-level, four-bay garage with dual center ramps that provide one-way traffic circulation throughout the entire structure. Access from the garage to the hospital is also made easy by a PB-designed climate-controlled pedestrian walkway over William Street.
Originally, the garage was to provide parking for 640 vehicles. However, after Parsons Brinckerhoff ran a comparative cost estimate for horizontally expanding the structure to accommodate 940 cars, hospital administrators selected that option because it provided enough parking to achieve their 10-year plan at a reasonable construction cost.