Building the Future of Health Care 

All Part of the Master Plan 

A rendering showing the state-of-the-art building’s multi-floor layout.

TU’s Director of Design and Construction David Mayhew shares what went on behind the scenes before the Health Professions Building officially opened.

When members of the TU community see the cranes, giant piles of dirt and corresponding holes in the ground that signal construction on campus has begun, they may not realize exactly how much planning goes on before the workers break ground on a new building.

No construction on campus happens without first making an appearance in the university’s master plan.

“A master plan identifies all our proposed capital improvement projects,” David Mayhew, director of design and construction, says. “It’s forward looking and sets a vision for the campus.”  

The University System of Maryland requires member institutions to complete and submit a master plan (or updated one) every five years. In 1999, TU began planning for the last 25 years’ growth by looking at the university’s goals and reimagining the physical campus to figure out how to meet those goals. The Health Professions Building has been on each TU master plan since then.

“It got bigger each time,” says Mayhew. “It generally was always in the same location, which is unusual. So much of our physical campus is fixed. Every master plan starts with our existing conditions. There’s only so much room to propose where new buildings will go.”

With the location more or less decided, planning then turned to the building’s contents.

“We worked with the [College of Health Professions] for two years before we even started designing the building,” Mayhew says. “It starts with the master plan; then part one of planning will quantify: How much is it going to cost? How many square feet do we need? Part two gets into much more detail. It identifies every room in the building: How many faculty offices? How many laboratories and what types? What kinds of academic spaces?”

CHP Dean Lisa Plowfield had a specific vision for the new building and worked closely with Mayhew and his team to execute that plan. The goal for the building design was to replicate the settings the students would work in after graduation, providing high-quality education in a safe environment and promoting student success and well-being.

Classrooms designed to foster collaboration and interdisciplinary education are on the lower floors, while the top sections of the building include more complex spaces, such as the health assessment lab, the virtual body lab and the simulation center.

“With the college’s encouragement, we took the design process to another level,” he says. “The simulation center is a high-tech environment where students can practice their skills in what is almost a real-life environment. They have very sophisticated mannequins that can replicate many types of human functions and are controlled by an instructor. They simulate different scenarios the students will encounter in a work environment.”

An area the design team literally took to a new level were the terraced roof gardens.  

“The site never changed, but the building got twice as big,” Mayhew says. “Originally it was around 125,000 square feet, then it became 175,000 and the result is a 240,000-square-foot building in the original location. When the building design evolved to match the scale of the other structures on campus, the resulting step downs with the roofs (from the sixth floor to the fifth to the fourth) were originally designed to be green spaces.”

Plowfield and her staff were instrumental in making programmatic connections to what became three terraced gardens. One is aligned with occupational therapy and offers a place for students to practice mobility exercises on different ramps, stairs and ground materials. The second is a respite garden adjacent to the simulation center. It’s meditative and quiet and intended for visitors to attend to their well-being. The third garden is called the Outreach Garden and is next to the building’s executive education center, which was designed to be a space to host all types of university events.

The goal for the building design was to replicate the settings the students would work in after graduation.

These gardens plus the abundant natural lighting through large windows and atria are several reasons the new building is on track for LEED Gold certification. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is the world’s most widely used green building rating system. It provides a framework for identifying and implementing measurable green building design, construction, operations and maintenance solutions.

There are many unseen features throughout the building that also contribute to energy efficiency.

“The mechanical systems in the building use what’s known as underfloor displacement air, where the air conditioning comes out of vents in the floor underneath the seating,” Mayhew says. “Typically, it would be blown out of the ceiling and mix with other vents to create the right temperature. But this can recycle germs. Our method supplies air at a lower level and moves it through the room in one direction—up to the return grills in the ceiling—making it a healthier option.”

He also cites temperature controls, occupancy sensors that control lighting in rooms and daylight sensors that monitor available natural light to determine when to turn on artificial light. The building’s outside received as much care as the inside.

We wanted the outside to reflect what’s going on inside. We were not afraid of having a forward-looking building.

David Mayhew

“We want to reach the building’s full potential,” Mayhew says. “We want each building to represent the future. So while we try to match each new exterior to the style already present on campus, we were all on board with a more modern-looking building here. Hospitals use state-of-the-art technology. We wanted the outside to reflect what’s going on inside. We were not afraid of having a forward-looking building.”

The university’s mission is centered around serving the public good, now and in the future. The new Health Professions Building—inside and out—has been designed to help do just that.