Essentia Health Addresses Weather, Bird Migration Through Exterior Design Strategies

BY: Anne DiNardo

March 6, 2024

The opening of Essentia Health’s new 930,000-square-foot St. Mary’s Medical Center in Duluth, Minn., would add the tallest building in the city. With a directive from Essentia Health to ensure the new facility felt a part of the city and inviting to the community, the project team was tasked with figuring out how to scale down such a massive building.

“The challenge was how do you design this building to convey a sense of modern, cutting-edge healthcare but also at the same time make it feel like part of its cultural and historical context?” says Saul Jabbawy, regional director of design at EwingCole.

Turning to the city’s mix of Victorian and post-industrial architecture and colorful masonry, the building base is designed with deeply articulated and striated brick panels and recessed glass that recall the urban scale and texture of Duluth’s masonry tradition. The upper levels and patient tower feature a glass façade, inspired by the surface of the nearby Lake Superior.

Design strategies to minimize bird collisions

Recognizing that glass buildings can create a risk for bird collisions—a particular concern in Duluth, which is located on one of the largest migratory bird paths in the U.S.—the project team incorporated a wave-like frit pattern inside the glass panels, which allows birds to see the building.

“Fog comes out of the lake every day around 10 a.m. and we thought it would be wonderful to create a pattern that’s reminiscent of the fog and helps to soften the building,” Jabbawy says.