Healthy mix

HSR meets the needs of two clients

By Janine Anderson

The Vernon Memorial Medical Office Building was a first for the Viroqua area, bringing together two health-care clinics to provide better services to the region.

Daniel Blumer, project architect for HSR Associates Inc., and Kurt Schroeder, HSR's vice president, said it was a challenging project to work on, but one that helped the community. It brought together a private health-care clinic with a corporate-owned, regional one, and put them in a building that connected to the local hospital.

"There are a number of projects where a big regional provider has gone and asked the local provider to join together," Blumer said. "In this case, a small private system went to a larger regional one and said, 'We want to build a building. Do you want to be part of it?'"

When the larger clinic agreed, HSR got to work designing a building that would give separate office space for numerous doctors and other health-care workers.

"Since it's a vertical building, it made it more difficult to align plumbing and electrical to accommodate different layouts," Blumer said. "There was a lot of working together to get things accomplished."

	Project Name: Vernon Memorial Medical Office Building Location: Viroqua Submitting Company: HSR Associates Inc., La Crosse General Contractor: Market & Johnson Inc., Eau Claire Project Leader: Daniel Blumer, HSR's project manager Architect: HSR Associates Inc. Engineers: Central Wisconsin Engineers & Architects Inc., Weston, civil engineer; Hanson Engineering, Oregon, structural engineer Owner: Vernon Memorial Healthcare, Viroqua Project Cost: $17.9 million Project Size: 144,000 square feet Start Date: January 2004 Completion Date: June 2006

The two clinics also had different design ideas.

"The private firm wanted a down-to-earth design with a rural feel to the building using stone and wood," Blumer said. "The regional company, they've gone to standard furnishings. We had to meld the private and regional views."

The multistory building is one of the largest in the area, Schroeder said.

"Picture this being the biggest building in this rural community and how it fit in," he said. "We had to use good materials, but not so good that it looked like they spent all the hard-earned money of the rural community on extravagant things that were not really needed."

The end product is friendly and comfortable, Blumer and Schroeder said, and it provides a convenient, direct connection to the local hospital. That benefit presented its own obstacle.

"The challenge we had was the architecture connecting the two buildings together," Schroeder said. "If the connection was too significant, it becomes a hospital. We wanted to keep it a medical office building."

As a stand-alone structure, the new building fell under Wisconsin Department of Commerce jurisdiction. If it became a hospital, it would be a Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services project. Both are state entities, and both interpret the building code in different ways.

"We had excellent cooperation from the state in connecting the hospital with DHFS and the building with the DOC," Schroeder said. "It did take a fair amount of understanding."