From Office Building to Ambulatory Surgery Center: A Conversion Case Study
Success was earned at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Middletown, New Jersey, in the form of LEED Gold certification, N+1 reliability, and an ACEC New York Gold Award.
Every adaptive-reuse project is complicated, but it’s hard to imagine one more so than the conversion of an office building into an ambulatory, diagnostic surgery center, given the strict requirements for reliability, resilience, and system performance. Complicated doesn’t mean impossible. However, the conversion of this 30-year-old office building into a cancer treatment/surgical center was extremely challenging but successful. The entire team managed to attain LEED Gold certification, provide an N+1 reliability on all critical engineering systems, and receive an ACEC New York Gold award for building/technology systems.
The project involved the adaptive reuse of a vacant 1980s office structure in Middletown, New Jersey, into a regional facility for MSK. Location was one of many the primary considerations. The facility, which is a two-building (north-south), 286,000-gross-square-foot (GSF) structure in Monmouth County, was hardly an ideal candidate for a health care use conversion. Its infrastructure and systems were woefully outdated and not structured to provide the engineered systems necessary for such a program. One of MSK’s objectives is to offer convenience for patient care access, and the site was right off the Garden State Parkway.