The Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes

Fitzsimons campus, Aurora

By Diana Murphy

World class and one of a kind, the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes opened in May at Fitzsimons Campus in Aurora, bringing a 10-year dream to reality.

The Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes is the largest diabetes and endocrine care program in Colorado. The new facility was designed by Anderson Mason Dale Architects, Buscaj Andrews. The contractor was J.E. Dunn Construction.

The Barbara Davis Center debuted its new $32 million, 115,000-sq-ft facility at Fitzsimons in early May, the culmination of at least a 10-year plan.

When the proposal was made in 1995 to create a world-class academic health center at the decomissioned Fitzsimons Army Medical Garrison in Aurora, the relocation of the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes was a given.

The then-15-year-old center had undergone a series of expansions at its facility at the University of Colorado School of Medicine's 9th Avenue campus in Denver - the most recent in 1994. But relocation was seen as crucial to the center's mission as the state's largest diabetes and endocrine care program.

"The whole medical school campus was moving, and we're very much a part of the school," said George Eisenbarth, executive director of the Barbara Davis Center. "It was essential. We really could not have continued our mission if we had stayed where we were."

Ten years later, the new facility is now a reality, and Eisenbarth has nothing but praise.

"It's a very beautiful facility, a unique building, and it came about because of the Davis family, the Children's Diabetes Foundation and all our supporters here in Denver - they put up almost a fourth of the cost," Eisenbarth said. "We're tremendously pleased."

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A Sensible Move

The relocation made sense from both a clinical and research standpoint.

"Now we'll be right next to The Children's Hospital when it opens [at Fitzsimons in 2007], and that's important because we provide in-patient care for them," Eisenbarth said. "When we were on 9th Avenue, it could be painful getting back and forth."

The new site also means BDC researchers will have more convenient access to their counterparts from other laboratories at Fitzsimons. "Researchers are like herds of buffalo," Eisenbarth said. "They need to be together."

The Barbara Davis Center is located just across the street from the three-year-old Nighthorse Campbell Native Health Building and next door to the historic Building 500, the old Fitzsimons Army Hospital, which the center was designed to complement.

"We chose the brick color and texture and the limestone with reference to the adjacent former Fitzsimons Army Hospital," said architect Jim Miller, with Denver's Anderson Mason Dale. "Natural finish, clear aluminum was used for metal surfaces. Clear glass was used to keep the palette simple." Miller worked on the project with David Pfeifer, one of the firm's four principals.

For J.E. Dunn Construction Co. - the general contractor - the project and its location also have a great deal of significance.

"Quite honestly, we target clients, and Fitzsimons was a high target of ours," said Mark Reilly, J.E. Dunn's vice president of operations in Denver. "Barbara Davis [Center] holds a lot of pride for us because it's our first project at Fitzsimons, and it's such a cornerstone facility. It's kind of a showcase right there on that main corner next to the old hospital."

A 'Fun' Project

Construction began in October 2003 and finished last February. The lab group moved into its new space on April 18 and the clinic followed on May 2, opening to patients on May 9.

"During the initial construction, we finished out the first and the fourth floors and we shelled about 41,000 sq ft of space on the second and third floor," said Mike Tilbury, project manager for J.E. Dunn.

Lab and office space for the researchers are housed on the fourth floor while the first floor features the clinic, a children's playroom and a two-story atrium lobby. The second floor will offer additional clinical space while the third will house more laboratories.

"Build-out on the second and third floors will begin in January and take about six months," Tilbury said. "The design won't be ready until later in the year because the grants [that will fund the second phase of the project] tie you to certain periods for design review."

The most challenging aspect of the project - and also the most exciting - was its location.

"Working in a campus environment creates a lot more coordination issues because you're dealing with so many other entities," Tilbury said. "But it was just a fun project [and] once the Fitzsimons campus gets built-out, it's going to be quite a place - and this will be right in the heart of it."

Warm Design

According to AMD's Miller, the building's exterior appearance is a function of what happens inside.

"The top two laboratory floors are laid out with the lab space in the middle of the floor and offices along the ends," he said. "This layout is expressed on the east and west facades - the end offices are curtain wall and the middle is brick with punched openings."

Two types of openings were used - large rectangles and small squares.

"The large rectangular openings serve the lab areas, whereas the square openings serve offices - where there's not curtain wall - and exam rooms," Miller said.

The building's interior was designed to be a warm and welcoming environment, particularly the featured space - the two-story atrium lobby.

"It's paneled in birch, has a black slate tile floor, with carpet insets centered on each column bay containing a seating group," Miller said. "Seating groups vary in furnishings to enable a variety of activities to occur in the groupings as people wait."

The birch paneling carries into the clinic and office areas in an effort to sustain the warm appearance. Door and interior window frames were done in wood rather than metal, "which almost by itself precludes the space from having any institutional connotation," he said.

Other soft touches include carpeted clinic and office corridors and exam areas tiled with colorful accents repeated on one wall of each room.

The laboratories are more institutional.

"Flooring and furnishings are fairly neutral," Miller said. "The exterior walls are painted an accent color; [and] lab bench tops are a medium-gray, which gives the spaces a considerably lighter feel than the typical black epoxy resin bench tops that were the sole choice until recently."

A Playful Touch

The facility's child-centered mission wasn't lost in the process.

While the interior's warm design goes a long way toward making the building feel less intimidating than a more traditional clinic or research complex, the design team made sure to include a fun space just for kids.

"The idea of incorporating a unique playroom was central from the early stages of design on, and also presented the most difficult design problem we faced," Miller said. "We must have had two dozen different designs for the playroom, ranging from 'gazebo' like designs to the more organic shape that eventually prevailed.

"But the connection between the playroom and the rest of the building, and especially its scale, confounded us well beyond when 95 percent of the other design decisions had been made," he said. "The playroom's design offers a lesson on how a building element in reality can be quite different than how it was perceived in model form.

"In model form, the playroom always appeared too small, insignificant, but when you're up next to it on the ground, the scale seems fine," he said. "Anyway, the shape, the skylight, and the colored window frames were conceived with the idea that children approaching the building would sense an adventure awaits, and, that what was happening inside, was about them."

Project Team

Owner: University of Colorado Health Sciences Center

Architects: Anderson Mason Dale Architects, Buscaj Andrews

Design Team: Martin/Martin Inc., BCER Engineering Inc., S.A Miro Inc., Wenk Associates

Contractor: J.E. Dunn Construction

Among the Subcontractors: Advanced Lab Concepts, Braconier Plumbing and Heating Co. Inc., Bergelectric Corp., Big R Construction, Glover Masonry, Hammert's Iron Works Inc., Metropolitan Glass

About the Center

The Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes - managed as a distinct administrative unit of the University of Colorado School of Medicine - is the largest diabetes and endocrine care program in Colorado.

Its mission is threefold:

• To provide care for children and adults with Type I diabetes;
• To provide a unique environment to foster clinical and basic biomedical research; and
• To support the development and application of research for the prevention, cure and understanding of the disease process that leads to Type I diabetes.

The center's clinical team provides comprehensive programs of health care and education for more than 2,000 children, young adults and their families. Outreach programs extend throughout the Rocky Mountain region. Kids from all over the United States and several foreign countries come to the center for specialized care.

The center also supports substantial clinical and basic science research programs to study this life-threatening, chronic disease and discover ways to prevent and cure childhood diabetes.

In 1978 Marvin Davis provided funds for the construction of the original building on the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center's 9th Avenue campus. It opened in 1980 and underwent expansions in 1983, 1986 and 1994.

The center's independent budget, fund raising and endowments provide unique facilities and resources for clinicians, clinical researchers and basic biomedical scientists working to help patients with Type I diabetes.

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