Expansion and Renovation with Intelligent Building Strategies

IMEG incorporated several intelligent building strategies in its design of Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital’s LEED Silver $170 million campus modernization project. The renovation and expansion project sought to improve the patient care experience by enhancing privacy, offering advanced technology, and providing more convenient access to inpatient and outpatient services.

Smart room technology was utilized in all of the new inpatient rooms. Wide-screen monitors allow patients to see their treatment schedule for the day and display the names, pictures, and roles of each hospital staffer who cares for them. Other intelligent building design included a building automation system (BAS), occupancy sensors, and daylight harvesting, These strategies, along with high-performance infrastructure including radiant cooling and a new 1,100-ton chiller (added to the existing campus utility plant to provide a high-efficiency baseline cooling source for the entire hospital), were key to the project’s modeled energy performance of 11.8 percent above the code baseline.

Low-flow plumbing fixtures and a green roof enabled water efficiency to be modeled at 35 percent above baseline.

In addition to meeting LEED requirements, challenges included connecting multiple buildings, crossover from existing to new systems, integrating BAS, phased construction, maintaining facility operation during construction, and maintaining proper pressure relationships between spaces.

Newer design and construction methods included the use of laser scanning of the 30-year-old structure (instead of relying on original construction drawings) to gather robust and highly accurate data for building information modeling. Prefabricated components were used for bathrooms, and racks for above-ceiling mechanical, electrical, and plumbing mains were built offsite.