Title: Southeastern Spine Institute
Location of Proejct: Mount Pleasant, SC
Project Completion Date: 2020
Firm Name: Novus Architects

Short Description: Southeastern Spine Institute (SSI), located in Mount Pleasant SC, is a progressive organization providing full service spinal care. Services include diagnosis and imaging, clinical support, physical therapy, pain management, and Ambulatory Surgery Center (ASC). The ASC also has a symbiotic relationship with East Cooper Medical Center in Mount Pleasant, servicing many patient’s surgical needs. Novus designed a new 75,000 SF three story medical office building that combines all departments in one building and moves the facility directly across the street from East Cooper Medical Center.

Architect's Statement: The project is a build to suit project in which the Developer/Owner selected Novus as part of a design/build team to work with them and the Tenant (SSI) to design a new consolidated campus for their practice. The program takes their existing practice, currently situated in two separate buildings, and recreates it with built in growth factors. It includes a 4 OR/4 Procedure Room Ambulatory Surgery Center, with a 2 MRI imaging department on the first floor, a multi-specialty spine clinic on the 2nd floor consisting of 52 exam rooms, X-Ray, and physician’s department, and a Physical Therapy clinic, testing lab, and administrative space on the 3rd floor.

The project site is part of a Planned Unit Development established for the East Cooper Medical Center in which architectural guidelines were adopted to create a campus environment surrounding the hospital’s presence. It also falls under the Town of Mount Pleasant Design Review Board. The design team engaged the Town planning staff and presented certain site objectives the design should achieve in order to establish a consensus. They include : 1) Prominence along Hospital Drive; 2) Extend Leonard Fulghum Drive, which is the entrance boulevard leading to the hospital that intersects Hospital Drive at our site; 3) Orient the building’s main entrance central to available parking; 4) Orient the building main entrance to allow for a two lane covered drop off with entry and exit off of same drive.

The established site objectives and building placement drive the building’s massing arrangement and its various architectural features, along with programmatic drivers that reflect on the exterior fenestration composition. The building has a total of 7 entrances and exits, and 5 canopies arranged around the building, and it is oriented on site to present all four sides of the building to the public. On 3 of the four corners of the building, Imaging spaces, ORs, mechanical rooms, and recovery bays preclude the building from having fenestration. Those corners also happen to be prominent massing opportunities to present the building from afar and provide signage opportunities. Playing off of the hospital’s use of large bracketed cornices, the design incorporates a one-story masonry base with limited appearance of fenestration to coincide with the plan, and vertically oriented fenestration patterns on the upper floors with cladding delineations to create a tower-like verticality. The corner tower-like masses are topped with a large bracketed cornices that complement the architectural language on the campus. The same vertical element was used to create the grand vertical circulation core and show its presence from the interior to the exterior of the building. The second primary massing element consists of a 2-story brick mass that projects slightly from the 3 story stucco wall that makes up the main building mass. This element is used to identify the building’s main entry feature, and is repeated along Hospital Drive at the staff entrance to address the street. The canopies’ use of custom exposed structural steel configurations, exposed long span roof decking, decorative light fixtures, and presentation of the roof pitch bring an increased level of interest and detail at the points of human interaction with the building. The material strategy makes use of familiar materials used throughout the campus in new arrangements and configurations to allow the building to have its own distinct identity, but also a familiar one to the campus.

On the interior, there is a common entrance lobby with grand stair opening and exposed elevator lobbies that provide a sense of grandeur and verticality within a relatively small volume of space. The common lobby ties together the imaging department, ASC, and 2nd floor clinic entrances visually from the main entrance providing a sense of building campus as well as wayfinding elements for patients. Finishes within the space are both elegant and playful, with use of integral linear light fixtures that turn from the ceiling down the wall in a repeated pattern resembling that of a spinal arrangement of bones. Acrylic light lenses in the grand stair shaft were custom designed to mimic SSI’s logo, which also simulates the natural curve of the spine. Finishes throughout the remainder of the facility are of the highest quality, and made of up a complex, but complimentary palette of materials, colors, and textures.