SEATTLE—The University of Washington Behavioral Health Teaching Facility is currently under construction at the UW Medical Center Northwest Campus in Seattle.

The six-story, 184,000-square-foot Behavioral Health Teaching Facility will be situated next to the campus’s current acute care hospital.  It is designed to address both behavioral and physical health issues, and its training paradigm will encompass training and buttressing local mental health advocacy programs.  The services provided will range from psychotherapy to medication management, surgical care and state-of-the-art “neuromodulation” treatments.   The facility will deliver integrated care jointly performed by medical and social services workers as part of a patient-focused goal that focuses on uniting the health of body and mind.

The new treatment facility at the University of Washington is a design-build venture between SRG Partnership, Clark | Abbott Joint Venture and the university itself.

“The design, created in collaboration with our clinical stakeholders, will be a warm and welcoming environment for patients, staff, and families promoting healing and wellbeing and reinforcing the connection between mind and body,” Carl Hampson, design principal with SRG, said in a recent statement.

Construction continues, with a projected completion date of the end of 2023.

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SALT LAKE CITY—A state-of-the-art technical education facility is now open as part of Salt Lake Community College. The new Westpointe Workforce Training & Education Center (WWTEC) will train students for business and industrial careers. The WWTEC, which aims to address a technical skills deficit in Utah’s STEM fields, is located in the industrial Northwest Quadrant, an area of the capital city that has been heretofore underserved in the area of higher education.

Under one roof, the WWTEC will feature classrooms for instruction in specialized technical areas such as welding, plastics, diesel technology and CDL truck driving instruction.

SRG Partnership, which is based in Portland and Seattle, designed the 121,000-square-foot building as a “flexible” modern space for education. Learning features include laboratories and “shop spaces” that are meant to mimic real-world work environments that students might one day encounter in the field.

In a statement to School Construction News, SRG said that replicating real-world environments at the school will also give some of the students a leg up when it comes to applying for jobs in their fields.

“With 46% of SLCC’s students taking career and technical education courses, the Westpointe Workforce Education and Training Center is making a huge impact to close the gap for the need of skilled workers for Utah’s economic development and ensure long-term vitality of the community,” the statement noted.

The building’s interiors feature high ceilings, a marriage between indoor and outdoor space and ample natural daylight for interior spaces. Furthermore, social areas have been specifically set aside to promote interactions between students and between students and staff. A solar roof also aims to neutralize the building’s carbon footprint entirely.

SRG said that the site of the WWTEC has a fault line running through it, as well as a below-ground high-pressure gas line—both of which had to be considered as the construction went along.

“This limited the area of building footprint available and led to the elongated form” of the building, the statement said. “The magnitude of its scale and volume at over 600 [feet] long was a challenge. The design team was sensitive to addressing the human scale by breaking up the mass through form and materials.”

Furthermore, the designer ensured that learning spaces themselves would face away from busy I-215 nearby.

“This allowed for the academic areas and entrances to be [at] pedestrian scale while the machine and industrial scale of the building was parallel to the freeway,” the statement said. “The building placement also provided an opportunity for SLCC branding and advertising on the east façade facing the freeway to help draw attention and interest.”

SRG’s partners on the $43 million project—of which $33 million went to construction alone—included architect of record ajc architects and general contractor Big-D Construction, both of which are located in Salt Lake City.

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EVERETT, Wash. — Washington State University North Puget Sound at Everett recently completed the new Everett University Center. The new academic building will serve as an engineering and STEM facility, and is seeking LEED Gold certification.

SRG Partnership was the architect on the project, with Hoffman Construction serving as the general contractor; both companies have offices in Seattle. McKinstry (also of Seattle) was the engineering firm on the project and was responsible for implementing the energy and water conservation measures into the 95,000-square-foot facility. The project had a budget of $65 million, and the building was completed in May 2017 after three years of construction.

With many of the degree programs at this campus focused on engineering and STEM, it was important for that to be reflected in the buildings standards. The facility is equipped with a living laboratory that will provide a real-world learning environment, giving students in the region the skills they need to compete in local and global economies.

The Innovation Forum is the heart of the building as a four-story atrium that links major entry points for students and provides access to the full range of activities within.The Forum also serves as a pre-function space and a gathering place for university and community events.

“Like an interior street, the Forum is fronted by key student support elements with multiple ‘storefronts’ for student services, a tiered lecture hall, a media-rich classroom and the Capstone Studio — an upper-division lab providing students and industry partners a place for invention and innovation,” said Tim Richey, project lead and senior associate at SRG Partnership. 

In total, there are 13 classrooms and nine engineering labs. To the west of the Forum, faculty offices and conference rooms surround a central, light-filled triangular atrium, which provides a place for faculty interaction.

The design team sought to set a high standard for energy performance with the design of the new Everett University Center, and it will now serve as a baseline for future campus development, according to Richey. The thermal envelope far exceeds the state energy code standards, using a rain-screen façade of brick and a metal panel with R-35 insulation and thermally broken cladding supports. A full-building air leakage test revealed a combined average of 0.217 cfm/ft2 at 75 Pa, which is 45 percent better than the Washington State Energy Code, according to Richey.  

Additionally, a low-energy VRF system conditions the classroom and faculty wings. The central Innovation Forum of the facility incorporates mechanically operable windows and louvers, providing fresh air ventilation and natural cooling. During winter months, heat energy is harvested from the building’s data center and reused in the Forum’s hydronic radiant floor. A 75 kW array of photovoltaic panels at the roof is dramatically exposed as the building’s cornice, cantilevering beyond the south façade.

Below the Capstone Studio is a 20,000-gallon cistern that captures rainwater and repurposes it for 100 percent of the toilet and urinal flushing demand between September and June, diverting the surplus to site irrigation. The new facility also boasts a complete LED lighting package. The LEED certification application for the facility is still in process, with certification expected for sometime in 2018.

“One of the unique aspects of the new Washington State University Center is that it’s the first building of what promises to be an extensive branch campus in the future,” said Richey. “Rather than comparing it to projects that have been completed in the past, this building is setting the standard in design character and performance for future campus development that is sure to follow.”

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