Top Projects of 2020, Finance & Commerce, Minnesota

Surrounded by nature and community, the Lake View campus in Two Harbors, Minn., crests a small hill that overlooks nearby Lake Superior and the town’s adjacent golf course. With the hospital founded in the 1950s and the clinic acquired in 2008, the existing campus had split health care services between physically separated facilities. Lake View teamed with BWBR to master plan and implement a design to connect the two buildings, as well as provide a functional platform for Lake View to evolve and grow its community wellbeing and care services, helping residents of the north shore achieve top quality health care close to home.

Phase 1 utilizes an addition to create a unified front door and improved patient experience, emulating the local natural landscape’s blues, grays, and iron ore to create a calming and familiar environment. No longer required to cross an open parking lot to access services, patients and staff instead experience a soothing connection that bends and wraps the facilities together, just as the lakeshore hugs the town. The central hub designates space for specialty clinics and improves operational efficiencies by co-locating hospital and clinic laboratories, locating urgent care and outpatient infusion adjacent to the clinic, and centralizing an expanded inpatient pharmacy. The master planning efforts set the facility up for further future expansion, right-sizing departments, and appropriate departmental adjacencies.