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| Campus master plan shows placement of proposed addition to north of clinical complex (top). |
The gospel of the General Services Administration's Design Excellence Program is finally winning converts in other federal agencies. Last fall, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the government's nerve center for biomedical research, staged a landmark competition to design a $380 million clinical research center on its 322-acre wooded campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The proposed 850,000-square-foot facility will be part hospital and part laboratory, a high-tech hybrid for the next century. "It's going to be an important center", asserts John I. Gallin, NIH's associate director of clinical research, "not just for the NIH, but for the country and the whole biomedical community."
The plan is to place 250 inpatient beds and 100 outpatient stations right next to clinical research labs and treatment areas. The new building will adjoin and replace outdated, overcrowded space within the NIH Clinical Center's 19-story building, the tallest on campus. Completed in 1952, the brick-clad tower known as Building 10 sprouts the Ambulatory Care Research Facility (ACRF), a 1 million-square-foot glazed box nicknamed the "flash cube." Together, the two buildings make up the 3 million-square-foot Clinical Center Complex, the nucleus of the NIH campus.
Staked out on 45 acres in 1935 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the grounds originally comprised three Georgian-style buildings arrayed around a quadrangle. Today, 70 buildings are informally scattered over the rolling, tree-lined landscape set within a suburban residential neighborhood. New buildings must conform to a 1993 master plan devised by local architects Oudens and Knoop with Keyes Condon Florance.
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Neogeorgian Quad: Original 1938 building.
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Clinical Center: Brick tower completed in 1952.
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| Clinical Center: Boxy ACRF (left) added in 1980. |
Architect Walter Armstrong of NIH's Division of Engineering Services fashioned an unusual protocol for awarding this enormous project, adopting the two-stage Design Excellence selection process piloted at the GSA by Chief Architect Edward Feiner in 1994. The NIH was able to select its architect outside the writ of the federal Brooks Act by signing a contract with Boston Properties, a private developer that has realized projects for other government agencies, to package financing, conduct the competition, and oversee design and construction.
The competition turned out to be like a large-scale laboratory experiment. It left some contenders doubting the efficacy of the GSN's newfangled selection process for such a technically sophisticated building. "The program is a very poor substitute for face-to-face conversation," laments one shortlisted candidate. "And when an agency hires a project developer who says, 'Please don't speak with the client,' you can guess they don't have a real interest in architecture."
Twenty-nine firms responded to the Commerce Business Daily solicitation last July. All were screened by a team of NIH architects and engineers, Boston Properties senior vice presidents Robert Burke and E. Mitchell Norville, and a group of professional advisors: the GSA's Feiner; Deborah Dietsch, editor-in-chief of ARCHITECTURE; Roger Montgomery, former dean of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley; and Jules Levine, associate vice president of health sciences at the University of Virginia.
The initial screening evaluated each firm's past design performance and philosophy, as well as the lead designer's portfolio. A few emerging firms such as Morphosis were considered, but the panel concluded that less-established firms could not handle the project's programmatic and technical complexity.
The preliminary group was winnowed to a shortlist of six candidates: Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) with Hansen Lind Meyer; Kallmann McKinnell & Wood Architects (KMV/); Cesar Pelli & Associates; Renzo Piano Building Workshop; Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (VSBA) with Payette Associates; and Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership (ZGF).
The shortlisted firms were given a stipend of $50,000 and four weeks to assemble teams, devise a scheme, and prepare presentation boards. The presentations were publicly exhibited at NIH, where staff were encouraged to comment. The competitors were evaluated on the basis of team organization and design, each half of the total score.
Each team was interviewed and rated by Boston Properties and a panel of NIH personnel: John Gailin, associate director of clinical research; Michael Gottesman, deputy director of intramural research; Gregory Curt, clinical director of the National Cancer Institute; and Robert Nussenblatt, scientific director of the National Eye Institute; as well as Project Manager Walter Armstrong; George Williams, director of speciaI projects; and Janet Hedetniemi, the agency's community liaison. Nonvoting advisors Feiner, Dietsch, and Montgomery also attended.
Program criteria stipulated II-by-33-foot lab modules, maximum 400-foot distances from patient units to laboratories, 18-foot floor-to-ceiling heights (incorporating interstitial floors), flexible spaces and infrastructure, efficient stacking, and clear circulation. Schemes were also rated for esthetics and contextual response. Because the new building will mediate between the campus and surrounding neighborhood, scale became a key factor. "Our master plan was carefully crafted with community involvement," explains Hedetniemi. "We were concerned about visual impact and the need for openness and accessibility to our community."
Most firms, however, proposed monumental massing and expansive footprints that appeared more like a hospital than a campus building. The two firms rated highest, ZGF and KMW, were re-interviewed by the panel and by NIH Director and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus. ZGF won the competition based on its past experience, team of consultants, and a design scaled appropriately to the campus and flexible enough to accommodate future needs. 'We preferred modest over monumental, explains Gottesman.
In contrast, Pelli, ranked last overall, proposed a 170-foot-high curved wall fronting the wooded campus entrance. Piano, who assembled an impressive team and wowed the panel with an eloquent, persuasive argument presented a similarly monumental scheme. The panel appreciated KPF's striking plan, which would have relocated the axial entrance to the complex and integrated natural elements--vegetation and daylight--into the clinical realm, but it had the largest footprint and was deemed functionally inefficient. The approach by VSBA/Payette was judged the most efficient, but its brick elevations struck the panel as reminiscent, of public housing.
While the NIH competition yielded a provocative range of results, questions were raised over whether this type of competition was well suited to such a complex project. The design teams were given general program information, afforded minimal interaction with the client, and were thus left to devise sketchy responses. Most of the architects construed NIH's quest for a pace-setting landmark facility--akin to Louis Kahn's Salk Institute--as a call for a monumental building rather than a recessive campus structure. Yet "the building could have been high-rise or low-rise; the client didn't know what it wanted", reports the GSA's Feiner. "Only when the proposals were made could the NIH see what the ramifications would be. But all the architects had the same information: this site is no mystery." --Bradford McKee |
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