The Health Sciences Tower at Stony Brook, the concrete tower beside the university hospital with oval windows at its corners, is getting a new exterior. Stony Brook University's facilities office has laid out a plan to strip and replace the entire exterior of the Health Sciences Tower, swap the oval windows at its corners for wider glass, and give the tower and its neighbor a matching look for the first time.

What the project changes

The university's Campus Planning, Design and Construction office lists the work as the Health Sciences Center Facade Replacement. According to the project page, it covers:

  • Complete removal of the tower's existing exterior, including its stucco and sprayed-concrete cladding and the structural supports behind it.
  • A new metal panel rainscreen system and prefabricated curtain wall assemblies in its place.
  • Expanded glazing at the building corners, replacing the existing oval windows to let in more natural light.
  • A complete new enclosure for the bridge that connects the Health Sciences Tower to the Basic Sciences Tower.
  • New cladding on the perimeter columns at the plaza level.

The university says the goals are to fix a building envelope that has deteriorated, improve energy efficiency and durability, and create a more consistent appearance between the Health Sciences Tower and the Basic Sciences Tower. The work is planned in phases so that the people who work in the tower can stay in the building throughout construction. The anticipated completion date is spring 2031.

A building designed as a city

The Health Sciences Center was designed by the Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg. The firm's archive dates the Stony Brook project from 1965 to 1976 and describes it as an attempt to change the setting in which medicine was practiced and taught, not simply to build a teaching hospital.

According to the Goldberg archive, the complex was designed for eight colleges, 3,500 students and a daily population of 12,000 people. It included a twelve-story clinical science tower of about 960,000 square feet, a 540-bed hospital of about 700,000 square feet and a basic science tower of about 225,000 square feet, all standing on a seven-story base built into the side of a hill.

Goldberg treated the whole thing as a container for smaller communities. The floors of the base building were divided into blocks of 200 feet by 200 feet, each about 40,000 square feet around an enclosed atrium, which he called villages of space. The upper towers were split into five-story clusters for different specialties. A level the architect called the ascension sphere linked every building, with a moving walkway, and aerial bridges joined the towers higher up. Students came in from the lower level while patients entered the hospital from above, often without knowing how much else was going on inside.

Why the oval windows matter

The rounded window openings are part of Goldberg's original design. The university's plan replaces the oval openings at the corners with expanded glazing. The bridge between the two towers, one of the aerial connections in Goldberg's original layout, gets an entirely new enclosure. The rest of the new face will be metal panels and prefabricated curtain wall.

The building houses academic and research space for the university's health science schools, and the university describes the project as a way to keep those facilities in use for the long term while improving their energy efficiency and resilience.

What to expect

The Health Sciences Center stands beside Stony Brook University Hospital on the university campus. Because the project is phased and the tower stays occupied, patients and visitors to the hospital should not expect the complex to close. Questions about the project go to the university's director of planning, design and construction for Health Sciences, whose contact is listed on the project page.

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