Baptist Hospital Campus, Pensacola

The new $636 Million Baptist Hospital Campus provides a 264-bed hospital and health center that offers multi-specialty services such as oncology, cardiology, outpatient imaging, and more. The campus is the largest and most expensive healthcare facility ever built in Northwest Florida.

The hospital campus spans 57 acres and offers plenty of land for future growth. It includes a 10-story main hospital, the 178,000-square-foot six-story Bear Family Foundation Health Center, and a 23,000-square-foot central energy plant.

For this project, the owner desired a design for its new campus that would be resilient and sustainable, improve operational efficiency, and enhance the human experience. The new campus needed to withstand and remain operational during major weather events. Because of this, the design criteria were stringent, requiring the hospital to support seven days of off-grid operational capacity and withstand a 1,000-year storm, Cat 5 hurricane, and 200 mph wind velocity.

"The project is in the hurricane belt and precast is an excellent product to resist the intense winds and flying debris."

- Skip Yauger, AIA, LEED AP
Gresham Smith

Additionally, patient safety, operational efficiency, technology integration, adaptability, and flexibility were important to achieving the overall vision and goals for the project.

GATE Precast collaborated with Gresham Smith and Brasfield & Gorrie to meet the demands of a compressed schedule offering multiple façade types and architectural finishes that complement the overall design that blends the architecture and interior design seamlessly together with materials like terracotta, wood, bronze, and terrazzo. The main hospital and health center towers feature GateLite while the podiums for each tower are clad with 6” traditional architectural precast panels. Inspired by wind-swept sand ripples, shifting clouds, and natural light filtration, the overall precast façade features simulated terracotta accents and a GateStone finish, which creates varying shades of color and a random appearance within the panels, lending depth and a timeless appearance. The finishes were successfully achieved because of precast concrete's aesthetic versatility, making the desired design achievable while lowering material costs.

"Precast is cost affordable compared to other exterior materials, and precast is moldable and can be made in many colors and patterns."

- Skip Yauger, AIA, LEED AP
Gresham Smith

Architectural precast façade systems were chosen as the best material to accomplish the project’s objectives; especially, sustainability. GateLite, our thin, unitized architectural precast façade system that includes structural glazing and insulation, reduces carbon footprint by over 70% because of its complete thermal, vapor, and air barrier system. Because it is a unitized system, it reduces enclosure time and jobsite disruption by eliminating traditional trades from the site thus helping improve the schedule and minimize environmental impact.

Together, the GateLite and traditional precast systems helped meet the project’s sustainability goals as they each helped reduce waste and energy during construction and increase speed-to-market. The structure of both the hospital and health and wellness center utilized Type 1L cement for the beam and slab mix, which contributed to a 13% reduction in embodied carbon compared to an alternative mix. Because the precast panels were shipped to the site with pre-installed windows, the construction schedule was accelerated by 5 months.

"Precast is constructed in a factory environment, and allows for faster building enclosure when precast panels are shipped to the site with windows already installed."

- Skip Yauger, AIA, LEED AP
Gresham Smith

The durability and resiliency of the systems also provide improved storm resistance and therefore, help improve the overall lifespan of the campus.

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