Largest "Healing" Roof

Rendering courtesy CO Architects

Native California plants are taking root on the largest "living roof" in Southern California, to help create a healing and green environment at Palomar Medical Center West (PMCW), a 736,000-square-foot hospital under construction in northern San Diego County. Installation has begun in anticipation of the hospital's Spring 2012 opening.

As designed by Los Angeles-based CO Architects, the expansive living roof is a signature piece of the garden hospital, a 360-bed facility also enhanced by interior vertical and courtyard gardens, as well as planted patios, terraces, and hillsides. The entire site is treated as a "healing garden."

The 1.5-acre native-planted roof covers a two-story diagnostic-and-treatment (D&T) wing that extends from the base of PMCW's 11-story patient tower. More than a dozen Southern California species are being installed on the undulating span, with the help of San Diego-based Spurlock Poirier Landscape Architects and Monterey, CA-based Rana Creek Living Architecture.

Palomar Medical Center West (PMCW). Deemed "The Hospital of the Future," this project incorporates sustainable design principles as well as a genuine commitment to Lean Construction practices. PMCW is one of the largest projects currently under construction in the state and is scheduled for a 2012 opening.
Photo courtesy Spurlock Poirier Landscape Architects

The roof plants will become self-sustaining through natural re-seeding in the engineered lightweight quick-draining soil, fed by a water-sipping below-grade irrigation system. In addition to resembling rolling hills, the undulating roof form was designed to accommodate highly advanced equipment. "The roof form houses the most technologically intense part of the hospital, while bringing nature closer to the patients and workers," says Frances Moore, AIA, senior project architect at CO Architects, which is known for its nationwide work on healthcare, medical school, and research laboratory facilities.

Though PMCW is one of the most technically advanced and sustainable hospitals to ever be constructed, the living roof and other garden-hospital initiatives mark a return to a bucolic chapter of healthcare. In the not-so-distant past, patients sought rural hospitals to convalesce amid gardens, nature, and daylight??"an intuitive approach still valuable today. "Evidence shows that access to nature reduces stress associated with the typical clinical environment and has a positive healing effect on patients," notes Moore.

Just as prairie sod-busters once knew, the soil roof also insulates very well, in this case protecting the D&T wing below from the San Diego sun. It also lessens reflected heat and glare into the windows of the patient rooms that overlook it??"thus reducing energy consumed to keep rooms temperate. Additionally, captured rain or reclaimed municipal water is used to water the drought-tolerant plants, which in turn filter particulates before the water runs off into storm drains. Water conservation in this way can result in a return on investment at 6% to 11% with a five-to-six-year payback period.

The roof garden is one of a series healing gardens throughout the site that include interior gardens on each patient floor, outdoor terrace with flower garden and naturalized meadow, stroll gardens, parking-lot gardens, and garden mall. "Garden areas can be locations for community events and meetings," notes landscape architect Andrew Spurlock, FASLA. "The gardens offer a setting for demonstrating and promoting PMCW's role in ongoing wellness education for the community."