Green Military Hospital Reimagines Armed Services Healthcare

Fort Belvoir Community Hospital is the first in a new generation of military medical facilities committed to creating a “culture of excellence” for America’s heroes and their families. As a result, we challenged existing military standards to develop new approaches for delivering healthcare within the armed forces. Fort Belvoir is one of the world’s first hospitals to successfully marry design principles that promote improved patient outcomes with LEED Green Building Rating requirements. The project earned LEED Gold certification, the second largest hospital after the New Parkland Hospital to have earned a Gold rating.

The 1.27 million-square-foot facility is organized into three parts: a northern outpatient center with family care focus, a southern outpatient center with specialty focus and a central inpatient tower. Each of these three centers has its own entrance and lobby for convenient access, but is also joined by a generous public concourse.

Key features of Fort Belvoir include:

• The broad, low profile creates large floor plates that facilitate care between departments. The edges of the building footprint retreat and advance, forming “captured” exterior spaces (courtyards) and elongating the building perimeter for added exposure to natural light. Courtyard designs fuse the curvilinear strokes of the landscape with the symmetrical, orthogonal lines derived from the architecture. .
• While the visual language of Fort Belvoir is historically and predominantly red brick, the new facility is composed of materials with a more modern interpretation: terra cotta tiles, strip and punched windows, metal wall panel surfaces and sloping roof forms that direct rainwater into drain pipes and rain barrels.
• More than 60 percent of the site was renovated with native and adaptive plants, restoring local species and reducing irrigation needs.
• Green roofs capture and treat storm water while rain gardens and river rock beds retain water and let it percolate into the ground. Surface parking lots designed with curbless spaces direct water into depressed planting areas for filtration. Permeable paving in parking spaces reduces stormwater runoff and minimize heat-island effects of the hardscape.
• Individual controls provide lighting and temperature efficiencies.
• The building is designed to consume 27.6 percent less regulated energy than a typical hospital, which equals 15 percent cost savings or $449,299 per year. It also saves approximately 4,000 tons in CO2 emissions. Much of the project’s energy savings will be achieved by a multistack heat recovery chiller system for reheating, high efficiency variable speed drive chillers, variable air volume devices, an energy efficient lighting design including daylight harvesting and a rainscreen system.

This project is distinguished by the United States military mission it supports, and required specialized security provisions in design (and redundant engineered systems) as well as numerous internal features for extensive teaching support.