Bethesda medical center grows, merges with Walter Reed

Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan once faced mold, mouse droppings and other squalid conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the District, but in three years, they are assured of being treated in private patient rooms filled with daylight and fresh air.

Walter Reed is merging with the National Naval Medical Center (also known as Bethesda Naval Hospital) as the result of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure recommendations, aimed at streamlining military installations. Under construction on the naval hospital’s 243-acre campus off Wisconsin Avenue is a major expansion to provide health care facilities for all four military branches.

In the newly configured Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, doctors will treat everything from post-traumatic stress disorders to prosthetic enhancements in “green” architecture respectful of the art-deco hospital.

New buildings for outpatient and critical care services, totaling about 682,000 square feet, are rising to either side of the naval hospital’s iconic tower and will be completed in September 2011. At the same time, 450,000 square feet of renovations will be carried out to integrate existing clinical and diagnostic spaces into the expansion.

On the southern periphery of the campus, a separate two-story building for traumatic brain injuries is due to begin construction early next year and may be completed in 2010.

“We have to create a very positive healing environment throughout the buildings to better serve the patients,” says architect John Richardson of District-based HKS Inc., the health care design firm fine-tuning the main additions. “This is going to become a teaching hospital, the equivalent of the Johns Hopkins for the military.”

For Mr. Richardson and the other architects involved in the $640-million project, the challenge has been to develop state-of-the-art health care facilities while respecting the naval hospital’s outdated art-deco architecture, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The vision for the original campus began with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who sketched his idea on White House stationery. Roosevelt’s stepped tower was inspired by the 400-foot-tall Capitol in Lincoln, Neb., designed in the 1920s by architect Bertram Goodhue.

French-born Paul Cret - the architect of the Pan-American Union Building, Folger Shakespeare Library and Federal Reserve Board Building in the District - was tapped to work with the Navy’s architectural staff and develop a final design. Building One, as the 20-story tower came to be called, was built of concrete and steel from 1939 to ‘42.

“It is Washington’s only skyscraper - not in its height but in its attitude of verticality,” says architect Bill Hellmuth of Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum Inc. in Georgetown.

Mr. Hellmuth and his team conceived the initial plan to bookend the tower with two large additions. “We didn’t want to upstage the original architecture, so we created symmetrical massing that was deferential to the tower,” the architect says.

District firms Hartman-Cox Architects and HKS further developed the scheme for builder Clark/Balfour Beatty to meet the approval of the National Capital Planning Commission, which gave its go-ahead in June.

Building A, the six-level outpatient facility to the north, will include an amputee center, physical- and occupational-therapy rooms, a pediatric and family-practice section and a cancer center.

To the south, Building B will extend from a boxy medical center known as Building 9, which was added to the naval hospital in 1980. The new addition will upgrade the existing emergency room along with facilities for nuclear medicine, cardiology and intensive care.

Patient rooms in this wing will be single-occupancy and fitted with lifts to carry the sick from beds to toilet rooms.

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