AdventHealth Parker Facility Expansion
AdventHealth Parker Facility Expansion
A Beacon of Hope
Expanding to meet demand
Growing With Its Community
As Parker, Colorado has grown, so has the need for the care AdventHealth Parker provides. The hospital's existing footprint could no longer keep pace with the community it serves, and AdventHealth turned to Boulder Associates to reimagine the campus for the next generation of care. The result is a seven-story inpatient tower addition and companion renovation of the existing hospital, planned in two phases so that emergency, surgical, and inpatient services could expand without interrupting the care already underway inside.
Phase one adds a new tower housing an expanded emergency department, catheterization and interventional radiology suites, operating rooms, sterile processing department, and med-surg patient floors, along with a garden-level addition supporting loading and central services. Phase two focuses on renovating spaces within the existing hospital to align with the new addition and modernize the original campus, including a new pharmacy and remodeled emergency department, ED entry, and reception/waiting area, along with a remodeled pre/post-op and PACU area, a GI suite, respiratory therapy, and telemetry spaces.
Complexity & Perseverance
A Beacon on the Skyline
The team's guiding concept, "a beacon of hope," shaped the project from its earliest massing studies through its final material palette. As the tallest structure on the AdventHealth Parker campus, and among the tallest in the town of Parker, the tower is visible from both E-470 and Parker Road, reinforcing the hospital's civic presence. Rather than reading as a foreign element on the site, the addition was designed as a kind of architectural cousin to the existing campus: modern and distinct, but still clearly part of the same family of buildings.
Light became the primary tool for making that idea visible. A vertical curtain wall and an illuminated parapet conceal rooftop equipment while doubling as a lantern-like feature that reads day and night, filtering natural light into the building and emitting light back out to the community. Achieving that effect required close coordination with the town of Parker, whose design standards, written largely for commercial and retail buildings, didn't always translate cleanly to hospital massing or programming. The team worked through several rounds of review to balance the town's requirements for storefront glazing, materiality, and a four-sided "all fronts" building with the operational realities of an acute care facility, ultimately landing on a composition of masonry, stucco, and metal panel that satisfied both the jurisdiction and AdventHealth's vision.
Site & program
Designing for What the Site and Program Demanded
The tower's footprint sits directly above the hospital's existing loading dock, a siting decision that let the team preserve space for parking and a ground-mounted helipad without consuming otherwise unused areas of the campus. It also meant threading structure, electrical raceways, and conduit around active utilities the team could only fully verify through in-field investigation, work made easier by bringing the general contractor onto the team during schematic design, well ahead of a traditional design-bid-build handoff.
The building's height itself evolved during design: AdventHealth's program grew from five stories to seven, adding additional med-surg and ICU-capable floors as the team was already deep into entitlements. Because the structural and massing strategy had been developed with that flexibility in mind, the team was able to accommodate two additional floors, all while staying within the FAA's and the town of Parker's height limits, without derailing the project's schedule.
Other site moves included relocating the hospital's helipad and ambulance entry to establish a new, clearer arrival sequence for emergency patients, and reworking fire access with the jurisdiction to resolve conflicting requirements for fire lane coverage. On the interior, the tower connects directly to the existing hospital at the garden level and through connector corridors on levels one and two; floors three and above, positioned above the existing emergency department's roofline, function independently as dedicated med-surg floors.
Delivery Approach
Building Efficiently, Together
To meet an aggressive schedule and AdventHealth's system-wide standards, the project made significant use of prefabrication, including repeated bathroom pods for the med-surg patient rooms on floors three and four, modular headwalls for patient rooms and pre/post-op bays, and a fully panelized exterior wall assembly for the tower's facade. Because AdventHealth was standardizing toilet room pods across several projects system-wide, the team coordinated directly with peer design teams and AdventHealth's corporate prefabrication group to arrive at a single pod design that worked across every project. The team also used virtual reality modeling and fly-through visualization to walk AdventHealth's stakeholders through the design before construction began, tools not typically used to this extent on the team's other projects.
Interior design
Connectivity, Renewal, and Wellness
The interior design concept carried the exterior's beacon idea inward, organized around three guiding principles: connectivity, renewal, and wellness. A neutral base palette is punctuated by floor-specific accent colors and wayfinding graphics, introduced first in elevator lobbies and waiting areas and then carried out through each floor, so patients, families, and staff can orient themselves quickly in an unfamiliar building. Curved forms recur throughout the interior, from nurse stations designed without flat surfaces that invite clutter, to matching curves in the ceiling plane above, creating a soft, human-scaled counterpoint to the tower's more geometric exterior.
That same attention was extended to how the team engaged AdventHealth's staff throughout the process. During an early existing-conditions walk-through, the team asked a simple question about a closed pair of doors that staff had long routed around, and learned the doors had simply been locked at some point, for no reason anyone could recall. Unlocking them immediately shortened staff travel paths, without a single dollar of construction. It's a small story, but one the team points to often: understanding how a hospital actually functions, and asking the right questions, can improve care delivery as much as any new addition.
