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Phase one of the outpatient campus will be located in a former Sears retail space at the Marketplace Mall in Henrietta, New York. The new facility reflects a convergence between the surge in e-commerce resulting in available retail spaces and a growing demand for healthcare infrastructure across the country.
As healthcare facilities across the US look to decentralise their services, the adaptive reuse of underutilised retail space represents a huge opportunity for institutions, like the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC), to expand their outpatient reach by moving to the mall.
The full $227 million, 350,000 sq ft facility includes a 210,000 sq ft renovated space and a 140,000 sq ft new outpatient clinical services building that will house 140 exam rooms for orthopaedic care.
Designed to be patient oriented, the team brought daylight into the existing footprint through a series of skylights and an internal courtyard that also functions as a rehabilitation space. The building’s sinuous facade represents movement, representative of the orthopaedic care provided within.
One of the goals of the design team was to create a feeling of familiarity and accessibility, amplified through a series of decentralised entry points and the addition of a dedicated bus stop outside of the facility along the mall's usual route.
Repurposing a traditional community anchor, such as a mall, helps upend perceptions of healthcare facilities as centralised urban complexes. We are integrating healthcare into the existing fabric of the community rather than asking patients to travel to a facility that might be hard to reach.
The renovated portion of the project provides 200,000 sq ft of a surgical platform with three operating rooms, a three room procedure suite, advanced imaging, clinical research, education, administration, physical therapy, and a human performance and injury prevention centre.
The multiphase project will be complete by 2023. The first phase, relocating the orthopaedic administrative offices to an adjacent renovated lease space, was complete and occupied in late 2021. The second phase, the conversion of the former Sears store to an outpatient surgical centre, will be complete by fall 2022. This will be followed by a rehab and sports performance centre in spring 2023, and a four story, 144 bed clinic space in late 2023.
The architect of record is SLAM (The S/L/A/M Collaborative), with Perkins&Will serving as project partner and design architect.