medical center

A Healing Art
As our business has evolved through the years, more and more often we've found ourselves involved in designing, engineering and installing waterfeatures associated with hospitals, medical centers and other healthcare institutions. These projects usually fall under the heading of "wellness gardens" or "healing gardens" - that is, spaces set aside for patients, families and staff to decompress, meditate or simply take a break. While these watershapes are generally simple in concept, there's typically more to the way they're designed and built than meets the eye - a fact that adds an extra layer of
Good Medicine
Built to function and compete in an era when marketing matters for healthcare facilities, the McKay-Dee Hospital Center was designed to create a soothing, supportive, healing environment for patients, visitors and staff - so much so that the center looks more like a resort hotel than a medical institution.   The architecture is open and soaring, offering sweeping views from interior spaces set up for comfort and restfulness.  Designed by Jeff Stouffler of HKS Architects of Dallas, the structure is organized around a four-story atrium that runs the length of the building, offering clear lines of sight not only to distant mountain and valley views, but also to nearby landscapes graced with winding paths and beautiful watershapes.   The opening of the 690,000-square-foot facility on March 25, 2002, was accompanied by great public fanfare.  As people in the community have embraced and begun to seek care there, it's been a point of pride for us at Bratt Water Features to know that the beautiful curving lake that wraps around the exterior of the gleaming building is one of the things people see, enjoy and appreciate the most. BROAD SCOPE Our job was to build all of watershapes, including seven small fountains and the big lake system, based on designs prepared by Waterscape Consultants of Houston and by landscape architect James Burnett, also of Houston.  As bidders on the installation contract in 1999, we had the advantage of being a local firm - but we also brought extensive experience with large-scale public waterfeatures to the table. And this project was big.  As far as anyone on the design team knows, this is the largest waterfeature/fountain complex ever built in the state of Utah.  We refer affectionately to the feature as "Bullwinkle" because, when seen from overhead, its oddly symmetrical free-form shape casts a silhouette resembling the cartoon moose's head and antlers.   The antlers wrap around the footprint of the west end of the building, with the nose stretching away from hospital to create a broad lake with a towering geyser at the far end.  The 175-foot-wide, 500-foot-long watershape features a 170-foot-long waterfall between the antlers and the crown of Bullwinkle's head that faces an outdoor pavilion/eating area served by an indoor café. The water falls four feet into a teardrop-shaped lower pond that serves as a catch basin - and which turned out to be critical to