Seattle Children’s Building Care: Diagnostic & Treatment Facility

Project highlights: Seattle Children’s Building Care

• Architecture firm: ZGF Architects
• Owner: Seattle Children’s Hospital
• Location: Seattle
• Category: B
• Project site: Previously developed
• Building program type(s): Healthcare—hospital inpatient

Seattle Children’s Hospital was founded more than a century ago by a group of philanthropists to care for children regardless of their backgrounds or their family’s ability to pay. That legacy of giving is reflected in this project, which aimed to modernize and expand access to critical diagnostic and treatment services for the region’s sickest children.

Hundreds of hospital employees, families, and community members joined the design team for 55 immersive planning and design workshops in pursuit of a high-performing and patient-centered model of care. Such a high level of engagement also reinforces the hospital’s efforts to address health disparities and improve the lives of all members of the greater community. 

The expansion serves as the hospital’s new front door and fully explores the notion of transformative care, which, for children and families, begins and ends with an easy hospital journey where they can focus on the care instead of the process. For the hospital staff, that means an optimized work environment that allows each person to focus on delivering quality care with dedicated amenities and spaces for respite nearby.

Across eight above-ground floors and three levels of underground parking, the expansion delivers eight new operating suites, two catheterization labs, 20 flexible inpatient rooms, a new outpatient clinic specializing in cancers and blood disorders, two pharmacies, and numerous laboratories. It is connected physically and programmatically to an earlier project phase, an inpatient bed tower and emergency department the team also designed. The pending third phase will bookend this expansion with yet another inpatient tower.

A crucial driver of the design was the creation of horizontal connections across the hillside campus, maximizing connectivity across the sloped site. Treatment spaces sit adjacent to the inpatient beds, minimizing transport times and placing vital services closer to the hospital’s high-acuity patients.

A wayfinding “discovery trail” ties all four zones of the hospital together, drawing on themes from forest, river, mountain, and ocean biomes. This new expansion houses the forest zone, where connections, or “trails,” stretch from its third level to the rest of the lower campus and from its seventh level to the upper campus. They allude to the forest pathways found throughout the Pacific Northwest’s natural habitats. A story pole, created by Native American artist Shaun Peterson, serves as a gathering point at the new front door and marks the beginning of the team’s comprehensive wayfinding strategy. Nearby, a large and interactive map demonstrates how all four zones are connected and highlights the easiest pathways to a destination. 

Framework for Design Excellence measures

Project team & Jury