Children’s Hospital New Orleans (CHNOLA) had an aging problem. The largest pediatric health services provider in Louisiana, it was operating out of a building constructed in 1955 and having trouble keeping up with the latest practices and technologies in healthcare. So in 2015 the hospital set out to bring itself up to date. What followed was a remarkable and complex $300 million renovation and expansion that, according to its designers, was about $250 million cheaper than it could have been.
David Deis is project director for the architecture firm EYP, which started working with the hospital in 2015. Back then, there were three options on the table: build an entirely new hospital, keep the existing hospital and add a new tower, or renovate.
“We initially said 34 phases of construction, but it was a lot more than that,” Deis says.
To save $250 million, the renovations took place while the hospital was still operating. That meant new construction happened on top of existing parts of the building and departments were strategically relocated as new facilities were completed.
“We built the lobby as the jewel of the project to get people excited, to remind them what this was all about,” Deis says. “They could start to see what the transformation was going to look like. For the patients, the families, the clinicians, it got them on board for the long journey and pain of living through this step-by-step process.”
EYP’s Jennifer Wilkinson, the senior project architect, says there were sometimes daily meetings with the contractors and hospital leadership about what was going where and how people should be navigating the space. This even involved regularly deciding which elevators would be used for construction staff and which would be reserved for clinicians and patients.
Determining how to maintain usable pathways through the hospital and between its floors became really key to the phasing, Wilkinson says, “and it also created more phases.”
“The contractors are not even allowed to dig a trench to lay a pipe,” Deis says. “You can’t plan for that.” Hurricanes were also a regular concern.
After five years of constant building, moving, and adapting, the hospital modernization was completed early last year. Deis says the turbulence and complexity might have been a challenge to most clients, but the hospital was unusually adaptable to the challenges of construction, especially during the pandemic.
“I think that because they deal with hurricanes on a yearly basis, emergency preparedness is their middle name, if you will. The pandemic was just another emergency to them,” he says. “This is a very resilient client.”