- I'm Stephen Chung, and I'm an architect and a teacher.

On each episode of Cool Spaces, I'll deconstruct the world of architecture.

I'll show you some great buildings, how they were designed and just what makes them so cool.

Can a health care space make you feel better?

We'll take you to a state-of-the-art medical school in Phoenix, to a sunny modern hospital in New Haven, and a clinic that's helping to cure Alzheimer's in Las Vegas.

Healing spaces on this episode of Cool Spaces.

- Designing a healing space is one of the architect's most challenging assignments.

The advanced medical technology takes priority, as it should, but as a result, many health care architects resort to tried-and-true and often uninspired formulas for their designs.

This is why most hospitals look pretty much the same, but then there are those few architects that embrace the challenge.

They reject formulas, and by doing that, they find new ways to solve old problems.

Historically, medical school was conceived as a space for future doctors.

Other students in health care studied in other spaces.

The Health Sciences and Education Building in Phoenix has changed all of that.

Med students, physicians assistants, physical therapists all study in the same place.

Traditional silos that separate various disciplines are eliminated and replaced by a new model based on collaboration.

[peaceful music] ♪ ♪ Most schools are-- well, they call them silos where medical students will be here, nursing students will be here, but this building will have all that in one place.

- Because the best way to train and the best way to get the best physicians and other health care workers is to throw them all together because that's the way they are gonna be in the real world.

- So we're doing a trach tube right now, and what we're doing is, we can visualize it on the camera right here, and we're able to find where we're going.

- And where are you going?

- And we're going into the trachea right now, and so what we're trying to do is get that tube inside, and I have to move it around a little bit.

- This is arguably one of the largest buildings in the United States that's really attempting to train health science professionals together.

- He's breathing.

I think you saved him.

- This is a virtual hospital, and the idea is that health science professionals can learn with patient actors the clinical skills that they need to ultimately work with real patients.

This room contains all of the equipment, all of the fittings, all of the accoutrements that you would find in an O.R., and it has a mannequin, and this mannequin is being controlled by this control room that we see over our shoulder.

And so you have clinicians and educators in this room, and they're running software programs into this mannequin, and teams of students can learn together in a virtual setting what might happen.

- So what is a health sciences education building?

- It's a platform for training of health sciences professionals.

And this platform in the last decade has become much more diverse and much richer in terms of the kinds of spaces that we need to design and program and create for the training of health sciences professionals.

[playful music] ♪ ♪ - I personally like to spend about one or two weeks on my own sort of trying to get ideas then, you know, we talk about it as a team, and if people have other ideas, we investigate those.

- Paul Zajfen is one of the principals at CO Architects in Los Angeles.

The firm has a wealth of experience designing health care.

They're also renowned for their work in large complex projects in the academic and science and technology sectors.

Designing for health care is a challenge because the function can dictate the form.

You need state-of-the-art classrooms, labs, and medical equipment, and these requirements can overwhelm the artistry of the design process.

The university medical school had already outgrown their current home-- art-deco buildings originally designed for a much smaller school, so this was an opportunity to create something from the ground up.

There was one other big challenge.

Temperatures rise above 100 degrees for months at a time in Phoenix.

Paul Zajfen angled the building to avoid the sun and added elements like fins and overhangs to shade the interior spaces.

- Wherever we had windows that were on the east and on the west-- we'd try and not have any windows on there, and then we kind of worked with the idea of making a building that was kind of self-shading, and then you'd have this kind of canyon which was a long, tall space.

- So these two elements are kind of program elements or big function spaces, and that space in between that you called a canyon, what is that space?

- This is the canyon, and it's unique to this place because of its proportions.

It's the main gathering space for the lecture halls, so you get access to the large lecture halls on this side and on that side, and all the students come out.

And the students come out after classes and can hang out here.

- So right now, it's about 110 degrees out, but it feels much cooler in here.

How do you do that?

- That has to do with the proportion of the canyon.

It's tall, narrow, sunlight doesn't get in here.

We have shading, but also, we throw out the exhaust air from the building into here.

- And I can feel that cool air coming out of that louver.

- Yeah, it's cooler than the outside temperature.

[gentle music] - The cutouts and the orientation of all the windows have been very carefully studied in order to really not allow direct sunlight into the spaces and have very close thermal control over the interior spaces given sort of the harshness of the sun especially in the summer.

[shimmering music] ♪ ♪ - Why there are no windows on this side?

- 'Cause this is the west facade, and we don't want to get low sun into the building.

We've got to keep the sun out.

- Another way to keep the building cool are the sails that rise above the building and shade the canyon below.

So tell me about these sail elements?

- The sail elements are to keep the sun out of the canyon, which is really important.

We wanted it to feel light and airy and to relate to the clouds, and so they are quite delicate in terms of the scale, the size, and how they span, and the color.

- And how do you hold this up?

- You have cables that are pulling this together, and so to stop it from collapsing, these structures are pulling this way, and then you have cables again here that are pulling this back.

So it's basically you're pulling it back like that, and then the tension structure is holding it like that, so it's in equilibrium.

- What's also striking about the appearance of this building is the copper.

One of the more complex copperclad buildings in the country, it took months of design research to create the look of a canyon surface.

- So this is an image of the canyons that you find in Arizona, and we abstracted that by taking a two-dimensional photograph, and one of the ideas was, can we make that, the whole building, read like that?

So we started off with this abstraction, and then we translated that into a panel, and we did that by having 26 different panels of copper with different striations, but you could-- They're designed so that the ends are the same, and you could put one next to the other, and that you gives you this whole kind of monolithic reading that you have of the building.

- So tell me about this detail.

- So this is a corrugated striated copper paneling system, and it's also a rainscreen system.

It's held out from the structure of the building.

- It's complicated.

I mean how did you do it?

- Well, through a lot of-- a lot of trial and error.

- Panels were articulated with folds in the surface to create a series of types.

These panel types were mixed and matched, and this created a range of different patterns.

It took an experienced metal fabricator to make this into one of the most complex building skins in the state of Arizona.

And what's this called, this machine?

- This is called a press brake, and for the HSEB project, we had to have it custom built just like you'd custom order a Suburban.

We had to make sure the manufacturer of the equipment could work with the tolerances that we had for the designs that CO had for the building.

- So this machine is just for that building?

- It was specifically ordered for the building.

That's right.

- So here's one typical panel with its folds.

So how many panels in the building?

- Well, there's 3,500 panels on the exterior walls, 10,000 parts and pieces, and it took 250,000 pounds of copper to make all those pieces.

- All built right here?

- All came off of this machine.

- Okay.

So at what point are you as an architect-- what point do you bring a fabricator in on a project like this?

- Generally, towards the end of schematic design, design, design development, and that's what we did here, and we were really fortunate in being able to do that.

- So why the cactus?

- Because this is one of the only places in the building where the copper comes down to the ground, and if you touch it, it's pretty hot, and so we try and keep people away from that basically.

- Now they're using copper in a couple of pretty inventive ways.

The first is the rainscreen system.

Now the idea about the rainscreen system, yes, it does keep the rain off the building, but really the idea is that this is a cladding which is clipped to the structure, and you can see that it doesn't go down to the ground, so you know its hanging off the concrete, but really the principle is, in-between, behind this panel is an air space.

So during the course of the day, the sun heats up the copper, all that hot air goes up through the air space and outside the building, keeping the inside a lot cooler.

Now the other really cool detail is the perforated copper panel.

If you look really closely, you can see all the tiny little holes in the panel.

Those little holes let the sun penetrate through and illuminate the space.

It also provides for visual privacy to the people on the inside.

[quiet music] ♪ ♪ The real test for a health care learning environment is how much the students like the space.

So what's it like having a sim lab to practice?

- Having a sim lab is absolutely amazing because we learn a lot in class, and we're not able to have the same experience in the classroom.

You can't really replace it.

- The old medical school motto is, "See one, do one, teach one."

But with a simulation lab, now it's, "Do one and keep doing it until you get it right."

Take for instance this pad that mimics the touch and feel of real skin.

So tell me what you're up to?

- Basically I'm trying to insert a needle into the tube underneath the skin, and it's basically trying to mimic inserting an IV into a patient.

- Let's see.

- Nope.

- Fail.

[laughter] - And I'm out of med school.

[jazz music] ♪ ♪ - They really took into account the teaching space, the study space, and the student space, and then you have these really cool little areas-- the canyon area that, you know, that's over here behind us, the common spaces that you will see that all really lend to a great setting, a great landscape not only just to study, but to be.

- The architects call this space the beach; the students call it the turf for obvious reasons.

Whatever you call it, it's really just an outdoor lounge.

You've got some wonderful cross-ventilation.

Of course, you're sheltered from the sun, but on a day like today where it's 110 degrees, there's a surprising feature to deal with that.

These are air supplies.

Now these are bringing cool air down into the space, and as you can tell by the way the seats are arranged, it's a very popular place to be.

And did you know that right above you are these vents that bring cool air down here when its super hot like today, when it's 110 degrees?

- Actually just discovered it, so I think this is my new seat from here on out right underneath these vents, but its little things like that that is just so awesome about this building, is the amount of technology that they put into it to make it a comfortable place for us.

- It's great.

We usually eat lunch out here because it's so cold in our classrooms, and so it's nice and warm out here, so this is where we come thaw out.

- So you're working right here in this space.

Why are you here?

Why study here?

- Well, this is a place-- these stairs are kind of a central area in our community here, so it's great.

You can be studying, but you can also run into your classmates, and honestly, even run into our faculty here, which are some of the most outgoing, gregarious faculty I've ever-- - You like running into your faculty?

- Yes, 'cause they ask you how you're doing and take you to lunch just because they genuinely are invested in their students here.

- So there's little cubbies everywhere, little nooks and crannies.

What's your favorite place over the past year?

Where do you like to hang out and do your work?

- My favorite place is actually the cadaver lab.

- Okay.

- I really love the view.

[up-tempo music] ♪ ♪ - Is health care more challenging?

- Health care is more challenging.

They're more complex because of the infrastructure and the systems and the kind of engineering that goes through the building and also all of the equipment that goes into these buildings.

- Using modern technology like 3-D printers to create building models is one way architects meet the challenge of designing health care spaces.

- These are the striations of the copper, the stair in the middle, and then the canyon.

- Can you imagine trying to simulate this texture without a 3-D printer?

- Yeah, no, I mean, well, obviously, you know, 3-D printers and computers have changed buildings completely.

I mean, the kinds of buildings that get built now you couldn't do if you hand-draw them.

- Along with 3-D printers, it takes sophisticated software to create complex buildings like the Health Education Science Building.

- We use a single software that allows us to collaborate and communicate on a single PDF.

- So show me how that works.

- Okay, so here's a plan, for example.

And this is a part of the building.

- So here's a plan of a gigantic building-- - Yes, so that is right here.

- Okay, so this-- in one location, you might have 20 or 25 different consultants collaborating, I guess.

- Yup.

Yeah.

- Right.

Okay.

So go ahead.

Tell me how that works then.

Each color on the screen represents a different consultant-- a structural engineer, mechanical engineer, or a plumber.

With a transparent three-dimensional image, each consultant can now see what the other is planning.

So what did you do before having this software program to help you?

- Well, you would have to take everybody's two-dimensional drawings, and then you would try to overlay each person's drawings to identify where there might be conflicts, and then you might draw a section to try-- It's very hard to see.

You would probably often find it after it's been built.

- [laughing] Okay, so this software's good to have.

- Yeah, very good.

Yeah.

- Could you do that building here in Los Angeles?

- Oh, no, I mean, you know, the climate here is much more temperate.

It's much more about being inside and outside and taking advantage of this kind of bucolic setting.

And I think what's special about that building is that it's unique to that place.

We'd never dream of building that here.

We'd try and do something else that's funky.

[energetic music] ♪ ♪ - You like this building, don't you?

- You know what, it's been a lot of fun to see the building get built and to see the building progress and to see the building, you know, sort of take on its own character.

- Being used, and everyone enjoying it.

- Yes, and seeing the people and what people say about it.

You know, I love that, you know, people talk about the copper.

You know, Arizona is the Copper State, so we have, you know, 150,000 pounds of copper outside the building.

You know, you're not gonna find that anywhere else.

- Do you think great design in a hospital matters?

- We believe it absolutely matters, and the reason why is because there is a body of evidence, a growing body of evidence that suggests that good design of health care improves the quality of patient outcomes, which is to say patients spend less time in the hospital.

They heal faster in higher-quality environments, in higher-quality clinical environments.

- In any health care setting, patient privacy is very important.

In a college setting, it's especially important because students, faculty, and staff all use the same building.

Finding a way to design a hospital in this type of setting requires some serious outside-the-box thinking.

[gentle music] ♪ ♪ Most people don't look forward to a hospital or doctor's visit, but it's not always that way at the Yale Health Center.

♪ ♪ - It's interesting is that, you know, so often you see a building from a distance and you know it's a hospital, but not here at all.

You might well expect to find that this was a museum.

I think I've made use of virtually every space in the building.

Although a friend, yesterday, reminded me that I had not made use of OB-GYN.

- So on the plans to the building, you saw this black-- this black building next to the cemetery, and you had some impressions.

- Well, it seemed very strange to me.

Why would you want to put a health center in a black building next to a cemetery?

I mean, it just seemed bizarre, but when I was a patient up here last winter, I was really quite startled to see how-- what a lovely spot it was.

I found that I quite liked being up here.

[peppy music] - How long have you been director here?

- Well, 17 years.

- Dr. Paul Genecin has been Director of Health Services at Yale University since 1997.

♪ ♪ How do people feel when they come into this lobby?

- Well, I think that they feel-- granted, the healthy people who come here for preventive care and so forth see a beautiful building, inviting, private.

I often think of it as a kind of a piazza.

- Yale University is often referred to as an outdoor museum of architecture, but the old health center was not one of these admired buildings.

Oppressive and outdated, the new health center had to be better.

Where is this building located in the context of Yale University?

- Well, Yale, and New Haven.

Yale is much longer than it is wide.

It's like a hot dog going from east to west.

We're about midway.

- Most health care facilities are rectangular in shape and built on a wide-open site, but not here.

The Yale Health Center is squeezed into a small plot on the edge of the main campus.

It was more of a leftover than the ideal site for a new building.

What are the unique challenges of this site?

- Well, first, the size of the site.

It's actually a very small site for the program that we had to put on it, and the shape of the site.

This is the perimeter of the site, so we had to put something, a parking garage, first on the site.

And this was really just the only location where the parking garage would fit, the size of it, so that left us with even smaller and even a more radical-shaped site to actually put a building.

And so that's how the building ended up in that shape.

- Another challenge for the health center was the high volume and high traffic.

- We take care of about 3/4 of the university's faculty staff and a lot of their students.

We have over 36,000 members.

We do almost 200,000 encounters in a course of a year.

- That's over 180,000 prescriptions in a year, and that's the largest retail pharmacy in Connecticut.

- That's a fun fact?

- Yeah, hundreds of thousands of visits every year.

- Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam have designed all types of buildings since founding their firm in 1984, but never a health center or hospital.

With some architects, their work looks kind of consistent, and in your case, it doesn't look like that at all.

I mean that as a compliment.

I mean, I look at this.

I look at this.

I look at this.

They're so different.

Why is that?

- We just can't make up our minds, I guess.

- Instead of relying on a singular design approach, Mack and Merrill see each new project as a journey to discover something new and often surprising.

[smooth music] ♪ ♪ - Well, what's consistent is, there's no consistent style.

You're right.

I mean, it is consistent, though.

There's a dedication to that kind of specificity, an almost clean slate every time out.

- You really had a triangular site next to a cemetery.

That was the assignment that you gave Mack.

- Yeah, exactly, and build a building of extraordinary complexity with a lot of different types of space including inpatient space, procedure rooms, radiology space, clinics of all different sorts and stripes.

- A critical part of the design process are the small study models that they start with.

How many of these would you make?

- Oh, a lot, a whole lot.

For us, it's important to use different materials in the development of the design, especially when you're dealing with a building that is sort of form-driven.

These are not wasted efforts even though it didn't end up looking like this.

We learn from each one of these.

[peaceful music] ♪ ♪ So how do you make... a health center that is that shape when most health centers are shaped like that?

And when you enter a health center in these conditions, you usually enter here.

There's a public space, and you start getting dark, and you go into darker and darker and darker and darker space.

We chose to do just the opposite of that where you enter in the center of the space, and you go out like spokes out to the waiting rooms, to moving towards light.

Well, we discovered that if you design each floor to its maximum efficiency, each floor would be slightly different.

So when you start out the first floor like that with its maximum efficiency, and the next floor is like that, and the next floor is like that, and the next floor is like that.

You end up with a really odd shape.

- What did you want this entry lobby to feel like?

- Well, open, transparent, welcoming.

- And I guess light is coming from the top and pours down into this space.

- People come to this lobby.

They move through it very quickly, and then they go to the more private zones of the hospital.

They go right to their destinations.

- Even in the private areas, frosted glass can still bring daylight in.

[soft music] ♪ ♪ - It was important for us to have an experience of moving through this building.

Every part of this building, as you move through it, you move towards natural light.

- So compare this building to the old building.

- Well, there's really no comparison.

- Dr. David Roth has been with Yale at the old and new health center.

- The old building was way outdated.

It was a dark, small building, cramped.

It was very inflexible.

We made due, but comparatively, this building is so much roomier.

There's light.

It's clean.

So we all love it.

- Now, the building in essence is triangular in plan, and it's actually a pretty big triangle, so the question is, how do you bring natural light deep into that plan?

Well, they do it by creating cuts like this one, and a cut like this one brings natural light into these clinical areas, these offices, and one of the really cool things is, that bridge which connects these two spaces allows a wonderful frame view of the ice rink, which is one of the original inspirations for the building.

- What is it called?

- The Whale.

- The Whale.

I don't think it's a whale.

I think it's a turtle.

- The Yale hockey rink, also known as the Whale, was designed by famed architect Eero Saarinen.

Mack and Merrill were inspired by its free-flowing form and its expressive use of material.

- And of course, Saarinen used a very particular technique where he sunk the rink itself into the ground, so he was able to diminish the impact of the building by simply putting it below grade.

- Half of this building is really pushed down into the ground.

The architects' interest in experimentation is reflected in the design of their own home.

- What was your neighbor's reaction when they saw your house design?

- Well, it was a varied reaction.

Most of them thought that it was not finished.

Kids in the neighborhood love it.

- And that's all that matters, right?

- You know.

- I see a lot of concrete here, and you leave it exposed.

Why do you do that?

- So it's in my blood.

- To not-- - It's decoration.

- This is decoration?

- Of course it's decoration, and it's texture and color.

- Up a narrow staircase is a surprise.

[peaceful music] - It's open air, and it looks out, and it's-- but it's private.

- There's a space at the Yale Health Center that's a similar private space.

It's a rooftop garden for quiet reflection.

- They call it the healing garden, and it's interesting.

They don't mention the word in any of the other departments of building.

This is the healing garden.

- When I saw it last, it was just sprigged with these little, every 18 inches or so, a little sprig of something, so it's really delightful to see it now.

- I think it's one of the most poignant places in the building.

- Putting a pool or a garden on the roof presents technical challenges.

In these cases, an architect can call on a landscape designer for help.

Now, a lot of hospitals have healing gardens, but this one's on the roof.

What's involved with that?

- Well, Stephen, it's almost like making a club sandwich.

So here we have our sectional sandwich.

On top of it is the roof membrane, and then often an additional layer of protection board, so that there's no punctures that can get through the roof.

Then the next layer is the roof insulation, and often on a conventional roof, the insulation would be underneath the roof structure, so a green roof is a little bit of an upside down roof in that way.

And the layer on top of that is potentially the most interesting layer.

This is a layer that is the water retention layer, and you can see it's almost like an egg crate, where water can move in between the little pieces but also be held in these little pockets.

- So can see these little cups, and there's some space there, so water stays in the space.

- And then on top of it, a water retention layer, and then this layer here is actually representative of the soil.

- Okay, and so this is dirt?

- It's actually not dirt.

It's referred to as growing media because the material is much different and lighter.

In this case, it's actually this material, expanded shale, so very, very little organic material and quite light.

- Okay, so a green roof is beautiful to look at.

What other advantages are there?

- Well, many.

Bird and butterfly habitat for one.

From a city perspective, probably the biggest benefit is a decrease in storm water going into the system, and then from an owner's perspective, a few.

First of all, it provides an insulating layer for both heating and cooling, but very significantly, it also protects the roof membrane, extending the life of the roof by maybe doubling or quadrupling it.

- So green roofs are a good idea?

- Not a good idea, an excellent idea.

- Hospitals are associated with a white, boxy, sterile look.

The Yale Health Center, with its black, angular shape, turns this notion on its head.

When you think about glass in most buildings, you think, you can see through it.

It's transparent, and that's fine, but in this building, the glass does so much more.

It's treated almost as a sculpture.

It's got moments where the glass is projecting and incisions where the glass is cranked inward.

There are moments where the glass is tilted out and leans over, and what all that's doing is capturing all the reflections and all the activity around the site-- cars dropping off, people walking, all the buildings around the site.

They're all being reflected into the facade, so with a bit of imagination, you can turn something which is simply transparent into something which is very dynamic.

The brick outer walls bend and bow to accommodate the different sizes of each floor plate.

Iron and manganese content give the brick a distinctive, iridescent texture.

- Well, we're looking at a flat brick, a normal brick, and then we're looking at a brick here that we have actually designed where we add a kind of a bullnose shape to an end of a normal brick.

- And why did you do that?

- It gives it more depth, plus the brick catches light differently because it has this ledge that is receiving light and casting shadow.

- Any architect can specify a standard brick like this, but Mack and Merrill designed custom bricks and used a technique called corbeling.

In corbeling, each course of brickwork is stacked progressively outward.

As the wall gets taller and the irregular profile bends outward, the weight of the brick becomes a concern, so grooves are cut into the brick which allows for extra mortar and reinforcement.

So for a tilted angle like this, you're just stacking the bricks?

- You're just stacking the brick, and it's connected to the structure through the wall.

- Hanging brick from a facade is different than the old way of building with brick.

To explain, we went to our structural engineer.

Now, Paul, the Yale campus has some beautiful old buildings made of stone and brick, and the the architect wanted their building to look like that, but we don't build like that anymore, do we?

- That's right, Stephen.

The way we used to build was with solid masonry, brick walls, and that way we would build up a stack of walls and allow that to support the floor systems as we went up higher in the building, and that works well.

You've probably seen this around in a lot of older buildings, but it doesn't work so well for things like an air insulation or water barrier to the outside weather over the life of the building.

- And they call this a load-bearing wall.

- That's right.

Load-bearing 'cause it takes the load of the floors down, and they were usually thinking about the structural forces coming down these buildings than really how the wall performed.

- Okay, so how do I build today?

- So today we build a little differently.

We have some layers.

So first layer we have is a structural backup to the wall system, and then we put another layer which deals with water and air barrier, and then we put in the insulation in front of that.

Now that gives us the wall to perform the way we need it to.

Right, now what you're putting there is the facade that we would build today, and the key thing is that we have an air cavity-- this it why they're called cavity wall systems-- an air cavity between our wall system and the facade that's built on the outside, so that when water gets through the front facade, which it always does eventually.

It comes into this cavity and can drain out and back to the outside and not affect the inside of the building or this wall system.

- Now they seem to have more freedom with this system because now, at Yale Health Center for example, they begin to stagger these bricks and do something like that.

How do they do that?

- Right, so in fact, this system allows for all sorts of freedom on the outside.

In this particular case, with bricks staggered outwards, what we have is wall ties that go from the mortar, that's in between each layer of brick that we're used to seeing, back to this wall system to give it lateral stability.

- And this system, even though it's very thin, allows them then the freedom to make the building feel heavy, weightier.

- Exactly, you have that look on the outside the architect wants, but you have the better performance of the building wall that we need today.

- The Yale Health Center proves that a health care facility can look as progressive as an art museum.

Gone is the plain, vanilla wrapper.

How do you feel about this project?

- Oh, I love the building.

It was wonderful from day one.

I mean the change in everything, tremendous.

- This is your child.

- This is.

This is absolutely my child.

It definitely, definitely is.

It was a labor of love, lot of long days, lot of long nights, and it was a fascinating project to work on.

- Are you happy the way the building turned out?

- Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yes, we are.

It revolutionized, actually, the way they had been delivering their health care services.

- It was a challenge to transform the site and transform the building and to transform their whole way of health care delivery.

That's architecture, and that's design.

I mean, yeah, we're really happy with it.

We got to do what we do.

- The Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health is a medical center that was built to bring worldwide attention to the research and treatment of brain diseases.

To do that in a place like Las Vegas, you really need architecture that will stand out from everything around it, and that's why they brought in the world's most famous architect to design the building.

Frank Gehry is one of the world's most famous architects.

You know him from his museum in Bilbao, Spain, or his concert hall in Los Angeles.

[mellow music] ♪ ♪ His buildings can change the landscape around them.

♪ ♪ This is the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health.

It was designed by Frank Gehry and partners.

A center for the treatment of Alzheimer's, it demonstrates how an architect can change both the skyline and the way that health care is delivered.

♪ ♪ The building has three parts: a clinical wing that's a jumble of boxes with patient rooms, labs, and offices; a sculpted event center framed by a café and community room; and a roof trellis that covers and connects the other two spaces.

♪ ♪ [percussive music] Now, normally when we think of Las Vegas, we think of the Vegas Strip.

♪ ♪ But there's also a section that looks a lot like other cities.

Four miles from the Strip is downtown Las Vegas, which is where the Ruvo Center is located.

There's a lot of open space to build on, and that makes it ideal for urban renewal.

♪ ♪ - Downtown Las Vegas, four miles from here.

Stay on the Las Vegas Strip.

Some people call it Fremont.

♪ ♪ - Now, this is part of town you don't see when you come to Las Vegas, downtown.

Now, away from the glitz and the glamour of the Strip is the Downtown Project, investing $350 million to revitalize CityCenter.

The key to this new development is moving the world headquarters of Zappos.com and its nearly 2,000 employees from the suburbs into the old city hall.

- Some people think that, from above, it kind of looks like a toilet bowl.

You've got the back.

You've got the hole.

We hope that as you come to work, you ride your bike, you walk, you drive, that you'll come right into this plaza and connect before going your way.

- Unlike a suburban office park, the downtown space will be a collaborative model, kind of like a college campus.

- So we're standing on the tenth floor of the former Las Vegas city hall, which will soon be the Zappos headquarters.

People don't ever look up when they visit, but it's absolutely beautiful.

- We have the youth and the serendipity of Zappos coming in, so it's a great time to live, and it's a great time to be here in this great city.

- Well, I don't know what "serendipity" means, but I do know what Zappos coming down meant to me.

- Wow, and what is this gonna be?

- This is roof.

It'll be a roof for a while.

- So can you point out some of the projects that you guys are working on?

New restaurants and amenities will attract the people who work there to live there too.

So you guys are making a very big bet on this.

I see a lot of vacant lots.

Do you think this is gonna work?

- We want a core, and I think what we're seeing so far is the work that we're doing is inspiring other people to get excited about redeveloping the culture and feeling of downtown in their own way.

[peaceful music] ♪ ♪ - The urban renaissance of downtown Las Vegas depends on open space, underutilized buildings, and a local commitment.

Enter Larry Ruvo, who had a dream to build a center that would study and treat Alzheimer's.

- I'd started with a local architect, had a building designed, showed the model at one of our fundraisers, and I just didn't get any traction.

Larry Ruvo is a successful Nevada entrepreneur.

He and his wife, Camille, created the Keep Memory Alive Foundation to honor his father, who passed away from Alzheimer's.

- Well, I was an only child.

Truly, you know, my father was my best friend.

- So when the first design for a clinic fell flat, Larry reached out to one of world's most famous architects, Frank Gehry.

Gehry Partners is in a large warehouse tucked away in Santa Monica.

The office has the quality of a messy art studio.

Frank Gehry can pick and choose what he wants to design and where, but Larry Ruvo was determined to have Gehry design his clinic.

- I went in, and Frank was sitting in his chair, and he looked up at me, and I said, "Mr. Gehry, it's pleasure to meet you."

He looks up at me and he says, "I'm not building a building in Las Vegas."

- Lou Ruvo was ironically very much like Frank Gehry, very direct.

- And I said basically, "Who the hell are you "to allow me to come down here, waste my time.

You could have told me that on the phone."

- And Frank Gehry goes, "Sit down," and is very-- it's just, "Sit down," and they sat down, and three hours later, they were still in the meeting together.

- That first... 4 1/2 contentious minutes turned into a lovefest, and-- - So what was the turning point?

After 4 1/2 minutes, what began to turn him to your side?

- We talked about my father.

We talked about what I saw.

We talked about what I dream.

- I'd love to see your concept sketch for the Ruvo Center.

- Ah, God.

I can't remember what I did.

[laughter] And then we wanted a center, and I had to join them somehow.

I made a courtyard.

- And this is really the public view from this perspective-- - Well, the road goes around here.

- Right, right.

And it looks like this.

- It does.

If you look at a painting, there is an immediacy, and if you look at a Rembrandt, you know, hundreds of years later, it's still there, that feeling of he just touched it.

Ah, I love that quality.

- Frank Gehry begins a new design with rough, childlike sketches.

- And it was amazing.

He was thinking, and he sat there thinking, and he picked up a piece of crepe paper, and he actually twisted it and threw it, and as it landed, he says, "That's the way it's going to look."

And Larry and myself looked at each other.

I said, "I don't know.

Maybe somebody's nuts around here."

- We made a lot of models.

- Next come wood blocks.

Each color represents different use.

- It was complicated.

We had a lot of models, a lot of stuff going in the wastepaper basket.

- Once the functional relationships are established, the models get more complex.

- Some of the earlier models were more fluffy, were more cloud-like and almost more predictable.

- These days, most firms don't bother with the interiors, but Gehry wants to literally put his head inside a model to see if the design is working.

- As we had to pare away and cut it to get it into a reasonable budget, take volume out of it, we did it in a way that wasn't predictable.

- After looking at every possibility, the final shape emerges.

- If you're looking at chess moves, visual chess moves, you don't know what my next move might be.

You can look at it for a hundred years; you wouldn't know.

[spirited music] ♪ ♪ - Now it was time to show the final design to the public.

Frank Gehry and Larry Ruvo agreed that this final model had to be attention-grabbing.

They called it the mouse that roared.

- I said, "We're gonna unveil something to you "that is gonna change the course of a disease.

"I'm gonna use Frank's celebrity "to bring international-- not national, international attention to Las Vegas."

- The model was unveiled there, and Frank Gehry was there.

Larry Ruvo was there, and other dignitaries, and they lifted off the veil, and you looked at it, and you said, "Oh, my."

- To ready the plans for construction, Gehry uses a powerful software called CATIA, a program originally created to design fighter planes.

Though it's only about 65,000 square feet, it took three years to build.

That's about twice as a long as a more conventional building.

Gehry's sources are never literal.

It's been said that he drew inspiration from the cubic massing of Moroccan hillside villages and the sand dunes of the desert.

You decide.

Now believe it or not, the building's actually organized in a pretty straightforward way.

On one hand, you have the clinical area, and on the other, you have the event center, and in between that, you've got this covered roof trellis.

This is where the front entrance is.

Passing through, you reach an outdoor courtyard that separates the clinic and the event center.

Flanking the event center is the café and a community room.

The outdoor court, which is covered by a roof trellis, leads to a meditation garden.

People call this the rational part of the building.

It's got patient rooms, offices, clinical areas.

Now typically, these spaces want to be a bit more boxy.

You don't want to have the kind of curvy rooms that you see in the event center.

Now, what's interesting about it is that buildings like that often can be a bit boring.

Now what Gehry does to wonderful effect is takes those boxes and begin to rotate them this way and that way.

That's why you get these wonderful shadows really kind of animating the facade.

[peaceful music] ♪ ♪ This is the event space in the Ruvo Center.

It's a 75-foot-high space, all-white interiors, with 199 windows.

Now, the windows are on all sides, on the walls, and on the ceilings.

In Las Vegas, where the sun is ever-present, it means that natural light will animate the space all day long.

With so much glass, there was a concern about overheating.

In response, Gehry added sensors to each window that automatically pull down shades when a certain temperature is reached.

In an event space, you want it to be as free and open as possible, but what do you do with the structure?

Well, in this case, the columns take the form of these tree shapes, and what happens is, you get this big trunk which begins to rise up and branch out.

Those branches begin to pick up the different loads from the different roof lines, and what's so neat is that these branches here that don't reach the structure here, they actually have ventilation in them.

So really what you're seeing is the integration of mechanical and structural engineering.

Now, when you design a world-class building like this one, you need a world-class team.

You've got an architect from Los Angeles that then sends drawings to Germany, where they're engineered.

Now, those drawings are then sent to China, where these panels, these structural panels are fabricated, and finally those panels are shipped back to the United States where they're assembled by a Las Vegas contractor.

Underneath this titanium shingle is a steel structure and the 544 unique pieces of steel that make up the building.

Get it wrong when you're building it; you have a disaster on your hands.

So how do they do it?

Well, each piece of steel has a unique bar code on it, and that bar code tells the builder exactly where each piece has to go.

- The brief was to make something that wasn't there, so that's what we tried to do.

I'm curious why somebody hasn't copied it already and made it ten times bigger.

- Open since 2010, the Ruvo Center for Brain Health pursues its goals of patient treatment and research.

So I'd love to see your most favorite part of the building.

- Whoa, where's your fav-- This building has so many.

I won't show you one 'cause I don't have just one.

[mellow music] ♪ ♪ The people came, and they looked at this building; they knew that we were serious.

It's a calling card.

This is a marketing tool.

This is what I said.

I wanted to use Frank's celebrity, and that's his celebrity right there.

That's what Frank Gehry does.

He's a sculptor.

He's an architect/sculptor.

Now, most important, that what goes on inside is as good as the outside, and that's what's happened.

How old are you now?

- How old are you, Al?

There's been a change for the better, not that he remembers so much, but he does know me, and what I'm so grateful is that he will wake up in the morning, and he'll say, "I love you."

Which, before, that didn't happen.

- When I took my father down to San Diego to see Dr. Thal, we were waiting about 45 minutes to an hour in his waiting room.

While we were there, there were three patients.

One gentleman was in diapers.

The other man was in a wheelchair, and the other man couldn't keep his head up.

And my dad's looking at me, and he says, "Is this where I'm headed?"

'Cause he was very early in the disease.

And I said, "No, Dad, these people are here-- "This doctor sees for a lot of other diseases.

They have something else, not what you have."

And countless times I've said that that conversation with my father, you know, scarred me for life, knowing that I had to lie to my dad, and that's exactly where he was headed, but it taught me that we don't need to have patient waiting rooms.

Who wants to see something like that?

Who wants to experience that?

- It's a simple innovation, but there's no waiting room.

Patients check in and go straight to their assigned room, and when they leave, they go out a separate exit.

- We will either find a cure because of this building, or we will find a cure in this building.

- You know, I wonder, I mean, it's such serious work that you do, a building like this, does it in any way help?

- Well, it's a tremendously creative space, so if you're less than innovative, if you're less than cutting-edge, if you're not thinking out of the box, then you're failing this architecture, so you have to feel like you're performing at the level that the architecture demands-- and I think everybody feels that when they come into this building, whether it be the staff or the nurses or the physical therapists, the patients, the caregivers-- everybody feels it.

This is the place to be.

This is the cutting edge.

- The first moment I walked in the door and saw the light coming through those windows, it was magical, I thought.

I like the space between the buildings.

I like the elevation of the medical part from the parking lot on the other side.

I think a lot successful things.

There's things I wish I'd done differently.

- Like what?

What would you change now?

- I don't know.

- [laughs] [mellow music] ♪ ♪ - Well, everybody, welcome to the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health.

Las Vegas is a very exciting city, and I think we're all lucky to live here.

To host anything here is one of my proudest moments.

The only negative is, with all these great hotels is trying to do something a little different when you want to get the world's attention.

For me, it took Frank Gehry.

- Oh, I'd like to do more things with him if we could figure it out.

- Yeah, he said one more.

He said I'd love to do one more.

- I want to do two more.

- Okay, maybe two more.

- He said you over-delivered.

He said it many times.

[laughter] - Whenever I go into the event center, certain things happen to me.

I stop.

I pause.

I look around.

And I say to myself, "What was he thinking?"

And then I smile and say, "What a really cool place this is."

- What I told Frank Gehry, "You're taking the single most important thing I have, "which is my name and my father's name.

Do right by it."

Well, he did.

- So what do these three healing spaces have in common?

They challenged the limited notion of what a healing space is supposed to be.

They focus on the needs of the patients and caregivers instead of traditional design formulas.

They show how architecture can help to heal the body, mind, and soul.