El Camino Health Integrated Medical Sobrato Pavilion
Established in the 1950’s as a district community hospital, El Camino Health (ECH) has long been associated with the spirit of innovation that drives Silicon Valley. The world’s first computer-aided medical information system was implemented on ECH’s Mountain View Campus, drawing international visitors. During the past decade, almost every building on its 41 acre Mountain View campus has been replaced with new efficient and technologically advanced facilities, including four medical buildings and two parking structures led by WRNS Studio. Two recent projects—the Behavioral Health Services Taube Pavilion and the Integrated Medical Office Building Sobrato Pavilion—leverage innovations in patient-centered care, such as integrated care and specialty services to improve patient outcomes. With its updated campus, ECH will continue to explore what’s next in healthcare, delivering a high-quality experience tailored to individual needs.
The Integrated Medical Sobrato Pavilion is a new 267,149 square foot, 7 story multi-disciplinary outpatient center and medical office building. It houses El Camino Health’s Centers of Excellence in the areas of Cancer, Heart & Vascular, and Neurosciences, with spaces that support integrated care and partnerships with both providers and research institutions. To accommodate the evolving nature of partnerships and advances in healthcare delivery, the building is designed to be highly flexible, now and into the future.
Located at the center of ECH’s Mountain View campus, which has undergone over a decade of upgrades and new construction, the Sobrato Pavilion helps stitch together existing architectural and landscape features with a design that is clean, elegant, and sympathetic to the park-like character of ECH. The building is organized as a plinth and tower to connect both visually and functionally to the existing main hospital, while creating a welcoming and easily identifiable western entry off the campus’s main vehicular access road. Similar in scale and connected to the main hospital, the plinth completes a central courtyard, creating a new center of gravity for the campus.
The lower floors are dedicated to outpatient procedures, including suites for orthoscopic, endoscopic and robotic surgery, reducing the need for overnight stays while providing a direct connection to main hospital functions in cases of emergency. By contrast, the upper floors house both the Centers of Excellent and flexible clinic space for lease to partner health providers.
The Sobrato Pavilion takes cues from the material palette of the main hospital—colored GFRC panels, anodized aluminum, and clear glass—while adjusting the pattern of fenestration to a finer grain suitable for office functions. The resulting pattern of double-high bays creates a subtle but dynamic vertical texture that catches sunlight at different times of the day. The use of these more richly textured natural materials ground the Sobrato Pavilion in the pedestrian scaled realm of sidewalk and landscape.