upmc falk building: 6th floor clinic

client: upmc

location: pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

completed: 2019

Firm: IKM Incorporated

Team Credits: Mindy Coblentz, Lauren Vrbin

This project renovated nearly the entire sixth floor of the Falk building at the UPMC campus. The previous layout, where multiple clinics located on the floor each had their own sub-waiting rooms, exam rooms, and support space, was inefficient and dated. IKM planned the floor to be able to share and maximize staff resources between exam room “pods.” In addition, the multiple sub-waiting rooms were consolidated into a single, larger waiting and registration area immediately off the elevators.

“Waiting Room” carries a heavy negative connotation. Through decades of impassive design, we have learned that a waiting room is a place to be dreaded and endured. The planned larger waiting area in the clinic had a need to have the seating areas broken up, to feel less like a bus station. This presented a design opportunity - a custom aluminum and wood screen feature developed by myself and my team. I created a separate drawing sheet to detail this feature. In it, I adjusted the slat pattern to seem completely random, although it was broken up into replicable modules. These modules could be prefabricated and had to be sized to fit on the elevator. The sheet also designated a mock-up elevation which was supported in the specifications. I coordinated a ceiling LED fixture to light the feature.

Bringing the slat wall feature to life was a fantastic learning experience for me. Although my design details were close, I alone was never going to have the expertise needed to get it 100%. Early pre-construction meetings with the aluminum and wood fabricators resulted in some adjustments. Welding the aluminum bars was impossible to do cleanly after some tests, so we switched to using fasteners, which meant increasing the thickness of the bars, which meant adjusting the pattern and location slightly. I worked very closely with Keystone Metals in Pittsburgh, who did great work in vetting the design details and making the feature work. At the conclusion of construction, Jayson Shroyer at Keystone invited the younger IKM staff for a tour of their facility and to learn about how a custom feature can successfully be designed and built by collaborating closely with the fabricators.

IKM photos by Adam Warner