Natural Thin-Veneer: The Real Deal
SUSTAINABLITY WITH STYLE
PARK CITY, Utah – The look of the Park City Medical Center needed to be extraordinary for both the owner and the community … and thin-stone veneer helped clad the way to its success.
Saying Park City is just another small town is akin to calling Paris just another European city. The community of fewer than 10,000 people is home to three ski areas, as well as the U.S. Ski Team, the country’s largest independent film festival and myriad celebrities.
Still, when Intermountain Health, the Salt Lake City-based nonprofit provider of health-care services to people in Utah and southeastern Idaho, began looking at building a hospital in Utah’s Summit County, they weren’t totally sold on Park City as a location.
Click image to enlarge“They were looking to build a hospital in the area, but not necessarily in Park City,” says Jeffrey L. Davis, who worked on the project as a principal with Salt Lake City-based Architectural Nexus. “A group from Park City really solicited to bring the hospital to that community.”
Even with that support, it wasn’t a quick process, Davis adds. The chosen site, in an area under development beyond Park City’s boundaries, need to be annexed into the community.
The appearance of the new building became a great concern to both Park City residents and municipal officials. Architectural Nexus has designed a number of facilities for Intermountain Health, but Davis describes most of them as being simple in materials and contemporary in design.
“Park City’s planning and zoning ordinances are directed towards a certain kind of design for Park City, so the aesthetics became very important,” says Davis. “They wanted the hospital built, but they wanted it to fit in with their vernacular.”
Further complicating the matter: the building’s size of 153,000 ft² and 26 beds is larger than anything else in the town.
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“The regulations are really written for smaller buildings,” says Davis. “That meant we had to break the building up into different components and find ways to use roof planes and changes in elevation and materials to really make it fit into what they desired.”
David Cassil, Architectural Nexus’ director of design and the medical center’s chief designer, says that, given the terraced site and the community’s desire for an organic look to the project, the designers opted to focus on stone for the exterior appearance.
“We took the lead on that to make it a nice fit within the landscape of the area,” says Cassil.
With that idea in mind, Davis says several options were explored, from man-made products to full veneers.
“As designers, we really felt the natural stone was the best integration into the site,” Davis says. “We also knew that there was a nearby quarry. We got in touch with its developer, (Heber City, Utah-based) Delta Stone Products Inc. Working with the quarry’s owner, Mountain Valley Stone (also of Heber City), they had developed the stone as a thin-veneer product, and it became a cost-effective way to use natural stone when a traditional way of using it would have been outside our price range.”
The Mountain Valley veneer – a quartzitic sandstone named for the quarry’s owner – comes from less than 10 miles away. Even though the project did not formally pursue LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System® certification, many sustainable features are included with the medical center, such as the use of the locally quarried stone.
