Green Flooring Helps Hospital Win Award
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Martha Jefferson Hospital proved that green can be beautiful when it was named America’s Most Beautiful Hospital of 2012 by Soliant Health, a health care staffing firm, which began holding a vote on the topic four years ago. The hospital won the award with its dedication to design and green principles, providing an example of how energy-efficient projects can be cost-effective and visually appealing.
Soliant Health’s president, David Alexander, explained his company started giving out the award because of the firm belief that aesthetic elements in hospitals can have a measurable effect upon patient outcomes.
“More than a thousand different studies show that when a patient feels more comfortable and less stressed, the healing process is faster. Therefore, it was extremely salient that the hospital has the right look and feel to inspire comfort and healing,” said Alexander.
Votes for the award tallied over 170,000 this year, over twice as many as in the previous edition. Soliant’s award announcement explained the hospital was recognized particularly for its “subtle, welcoming charm,” compared to the monumental scale and feel of some of its competitors. The document added that key features of the hospital included “a pitched roof and extensive gardens to promote a feeling of home, designer slate elevator bays, decorative frosted glass windows to allow light in as much as possible while maintaining privacy, and hand-crafted tile designed specifically for each patient bathroom.”
The building was designed by architectural firm Kahler Slater, with Mortenson Construction Company serving as construction manager. Kelly Stueber, Associate and interior designer at Kahler Slater attributed some of the hospital’s success in the Soliant awards to the architect firm’s choice of Armstrong Commercial Flooring’s Linorette as the primary flooring material. Stueber said the product was chosen because it would mesh well with other visual aspects of the structure and also satisfied the hospital leadership’s goals for sustainable products. The company makes a variety of flooring materials with different levels of “greenness.” Each of the company’s products satisfies at least one requirement of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED certification process.
“We were looking for a product that offered warmth, variety and sustainable aspects and linoleum was a win,” said Stueber. Michele Zelman, public relations officer for Armstrong. He also explained the product formula consisted of “35 percent pre-consumer recycled content and 36 percent rapidly renewable raw materials.” The product also uses the same natural ingredients as it did in the early 1900s, including linseed oil, wood power, and jute backing. Linoleum was also selected because of the relative ease of cleaning the material, which results in less chemical cleaners being used in the hospital. The product’s scratch-resistant coating also factored into the decision.
Stueber went on to say that his company had a prior relationship with Armstrong and trusted the staff there, in addition to the product itself. The architects worked with the flooring provider’s staff to create visual models to ensure the linoleum product would be the right fit for the hospitals relatively long and narrow corridors, which can alter the look of a flooring product, similar to how vertical or horizontal lines can cause the same object to look slimmer or wider.
The $275 million hospital was completed in 2011 on a new 88-acre plot, after the original 108-year-old Martha Jefferson Hospital outgrew its original location. The hospital currently stands at 540,000 square feet, with 176 inpatient beds, but the master plan includes 1.3 million square feet and 448 inpatient beds.