Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects Is Honored

Each year, Contract Magazine's Healthcare Environments Awards Competition, is conducted in conjunction with The Center for Health Design and the HEALTHCARE DESIGN.08 Conference. The competition puts the healthcare market under the microscope to examine today's healing environments. The goal: To recognize design innovation that enhances the delivery of healthcare.

This year Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects was honored as the Health and Fitness Winner for its University of Oregon Athletic Medicine Center.

The University of Oregon's 15,000-sq.-ft. Athletic Medicine Center (AMC) is in a league of its own. Designed to reflect a holistic approach to athlete care, the sports therapy and training facility incorporates tools that heal (massage tables, hydro-therapy tubs, exam rooms, a pharmacy, an x-ray facility) alongside tools that help make athletes stronger (bikes and treadmills), better nourished (nutrition bar), and healthier and more motivated (optometry, dental, and acupuncture offices).

Student athletes are welcomed into the center via a seating area anchored by a reception desk and nutrition bar, that is further divided into smaller sections by a zig-zagging, internally illuminated white Corian bench that references an unraveling roll of tape. Throughout the space, four pictorial screens showcase the university's athletic history and a white oak wall features a horizontal stream of the names of the university's most important coaches physically branded into its surface. Other references to the university's history is the school's “O” logo springing from 3,000 aluminum rods in a glass wall separated the nutrition bar from custom-designed taping tables; bar stools with leather covers that were laser cut to reflect numerical statistics of various sports; and acrylic finds in the exam rooms that progress from yellow to green, the university's colors.

Go ZGF! Go Ducks!