The new Cancer Support Community building in Lakewood Ranch uplifts clients through its architecture
Formerly The Wellness Community, Cancer Support Community-Florida Suncoast’s new facility in Lakewood Ranch is expected to qualify for LEED Gold certification as a green building, said architect Michael Carlson.
STAFF PHOTOS / HAROLD BUBIL
Source Herald Tribune; By Harold Bubil
Published: Sunday, October 17, 2010 at 1:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 4:12 p.m.
If anything, people who have just been given a cancer diagnosis need a friend.t the Cancer Support Community Florida Suncoast’s green new facility in Lakewood Ranch, architect Michael Carlson has given them eight, in the form of 500-year-old pine logs serving as support posts. He says they are like “old friends.”
Recovered from river bottoms, the logs are the distinctive architectural feature of the $6.1 million building, which will be dedicated Nov. 12 with a black-tie gala. The four, 30-foot-tall main posts support a 156-foot-long archway — “the bridge of hope” — that peaks at 35 feet above the building’s courtyard, linking the structure’s two sections.
“They have so much warmth and character to them,” said Carlson, one of the region’s leading green architects.
“When you walk in here, these are sort of like your old friends … who have been here forever and are solid as a rock. You can touch them and feel them. They have that sense of permanence.”
The posts are from longleaf pine trees that were harvested in North Central Florida in the 1800s and floated down the Suwannee River to sawmills. But some of the logs sank, preserved for a century in the muck.
Goodwin Heart Pine of Micanopy, south of Gainesville, recovers the logs and sells them to builders. The eight logs at the Cancer Support Community cost $30,000, said Carlson.
To make the design more dynamic, the posts are perpendicular to the arch, not the ground.
“It would be a lot more stagnant if that were the case,” said Carlson.
Stagnant just would not do at the Cancer Support Community. Peaceful, yes. Stale, no.
“Place matters” to cancer patients, says Johnette Isham, one of the leaders of the “Building Hope” construction program.
Several design charrettes and a lot of research went into the design of the 11,142-square-foot CSC. Senior Vice President Jay Lockaby said one of the research points “was to make an arrival experience, to have an obvious point of entry for someone new to the place. To have a … warm environment for them to come into.”
CSC program participant Dawn Moore, a breast cancer survivor, says there’s “a very peaceful sense” in the new building.
That is fitting, as the CSC’s mission is to provide psychological and social support to cancer patients and their relatives and caregivers, free of charge. CSC is part of the largest professionally trained network of cancer support facilities in the world, resulting from a merger of The Wellness Community and Gilda’s Clubs, named for the late comedienne and ovarian cancer victim Gilda Radner.
“There was always the sense that this project had to convey hope to people,” said Carlson, who added that the building did not take long to build, but took a long time to plan. “So I looked for something that could convey that sense of hope in the architecture.
“The arch form is a traditional form that symbolizes strength and permanence. Conceptually, the shape of the rainbow is the eternal symbol of hope.”
Interior spaces, which were designed by students at the Ringling College of Art and Design and TRO Jung/Brannen, are distributed among two buildings, 40 feet apart.
The spaces include a meditation and exercise studio, a library, an education room, an art studio for children to encourage self-expression, gallery spaces, an Internet café, counseling and meeting rooms of various sizes; a large multiuse room for events, fundraisers, yoga and tai-chi, with a teaching kitchen (good nutrition is stressed); and outdoor areas for tai-chi, dining and healing gardens.
The complex has restful vistas of a nature preserve that is part of Schroeder-Manatee Ranch.
Color choices replicate colors found in nature, which is believed to be more beneficial for cancer patients.
“A lot of that thinking came from the Ringling College class,” said CSC board member David Shaver. “One of their senior classes devoted an entire semester to this building. They did the original color palette.”
“The group rooms are quiet, with a living-room feel, but you know you are not at home,” said Lockaby. “This is where we do support groups, primarily, and individual and family therapies.”
The building, intended as it is to foster better health, includes many of the standard green features that make up the United States Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) program. Carlson expects that the building’s design has earned enough “LEED points” to qualify for the LEED-NC (new construction) Gold certification.
Green design starts in the parking lot, where LEV (low-emission vehicles) get the prime parking spots. Seldom-used outlying spaces are sodded rather than paved. The pavement is concrete rather than blacktop to lower the “heat-island” effect.
The five-acre site, secluded yet convenient to Interstate 75, was a blank slate for the architect, enabling Carlson to orient the building so that the longer walls face north and south.
“It looks like it’s at some random angle,” said Carlson. “So it makes the site more dynamic, and gives us the passive solar orientation that saves us energy.”
Overhangs on the sunny south side of the building are 4 feet, but just 2 feet on the shady north side. That is attention to detail. “Just real traditional, passive, energy-saving features,” said the architect.
Another traditional feature is the roof, a standing-seam metal assembly mounted atop structural insulated panels. The walls are insulated concrete forms (ICFs) with an insulative value of R-30. Windows and doors have double-pane insulated glazing with low-emissivity coating, and they are impact-resistant.
“It’s just a great building envelope,” said Carlson.
Reclaimed water is filtered and reused for toilets. The 16-SEER air-conditioning has multiple zones. Some floors are renewable bamboo or cork, while high-traffic areas have carpet tiles. Some of the light fixtures have energy-saving LED bulbs.
Of critical importance for the CSC’s clientele, paints are low- or no-VOC; they offgas very small amounts of the toxic volatile organic compounds found in standard paints.
In the landscape, shade will be provided by 300 mature sabal palms transplanted onto the site, so that the owners do not have to wait for shade trees to grow. Although the plants, including philodendrons and bromeliads in the courtyard, are Florida-friendly, and there is little grass on the site, the landscape has ample hardscapes and rock gardens, along with several soothing fountains.
“The idea was to develop gardens that would promote healing,” said landscape architect David Young. “Get people in the gardens to alleviate stress. They have choices about which garden they want to go to, whether they want to go to a sunny spot or a shaded area, an area with water, an area void of water, more contemplative spaces in the back. It’s about freedom of choice and comfort and accessibility.”
Young said the landscape is designed with a component of LID low-impact development, allowing rain water “to come off the hardscaped areas and into planting areas, before it goes into a catch basin or retention ponds, so we can use it first for irrigation,” he said.
Carlson is pleased with the project’s result.
“It is the most important building I have ever done,” he said, adding, “There were a whole lot of people who worked on it. Architecture has to commit at some point to be something. That was the most successful part — that it (the design) took all these ideas and consolidated it into one strong, singular idea.”
