Our design concept for a new veterans’ clinic in Fredericksburg, Virginia, achieves an extraordinary combination of efficiency and experiential richness, honoring and caring for veterans in an environment focused on physical and emotional healing, community cohesion and a sense of place.
Box and Spine
The clinic’s massing and organization is rooted in the need to maximize access to care for veterans. A “box and spine” plan organizes a right-sized program of healthcare functions and community-oriented public spaces around a central circulation area. This highly efficient approach provides the greatest amount of usable healthcare space per square foot.
Community Weave
The rectangular massing is modified with a number of carve-outs to weave the interior program together with the site. At the main entrance, a corner is removed to create a large outdoor event space and sculpture garden. Around the perimeter, a series of small interventions are made to create “pocket parks” as places of respite.
Hero's Walk and Main Street
The central circulation spine creates an axis that extends through the site. A tree-lined “Hero’s Walk” runs through the parking lot, ushering visitors into a two-story, glass-enclosed entrance. Canopies at each terminus of the central spine serve as a welcoming gesture. Continuing through the building, the Hero’s Walk transforms into a Main Street, where the straightforward gesture of the spine is given life by an interior program that functions like a city street. Daylit areas of respite dot the interior circulation between functional nodes such as the pharmacy and a café.
Light Wells
Additional mass is pared away to allow light to penetrate into the center of a wide floor plate. Along the central spine and articulated the façade, clerestory light shafts establish a number of light-filled interior courtyards. Daylight filters down through each of the building’s four stories, penetrating deep into the main spine.
What is an energizing gesture from the exterior becomes a peaceful reflection space once inside, rising through the ceiling of the main atrium and settling into a double-height, second-floor waiting area.
Vertically oriented slats of wood draw the eye through the space, harmonizing with the forested context and providing an occupiable place of respite for families waiting outside the third-floor surgery suites.
A green wall in the main atrium creates continuity between the outdoor sculpture garden and the sculptural Nest above.
Monumental Stairs
Greeting patients within the double-height, glass-enclosed lobby space, a set of monumental stairs anchors the entry experience. These function not merely as a means of conveyance, but as a symbol of wellbeing. As veterans with mobility challenges work toward recovery, the lobby stairs provide a goal to reach for. The form of the stair is sculpted to form places for rest, if needed, to scaffold physical rehabilitation.
Chosen to maximize the proportion of cost devoted to healthcare functions, the concrete material came with complex and rigid dimensional requirements. The completed design works within these restrictions to capture the rhythm, light and texture of the surrounding forest within the panel size and solidity constraints of the precast system.