We have Open Hand Studio, which is CannonDesign’s public interest design arm, through which we design solutions that address essential human needs and scale impact around the world. We specifically became connected to the Sunflower Network effort through one of our clients—Kaiser Permanente—who introduced us and recommended we connect because they knew we did this kind of work. We did a virtual meet-and-greet and learned about Sunflower Network. 

Very extraordinary. So we were incredibly inspired and knew immediately this is something we wanted to support.

Sunflower Network brought us in, and Fred Clarke has a relationship with Hines, one of the project’s global partners. Tommy Craig at Hines brought in Fred, and so the two of us, the two teams, have been partnering together, and we both add different specialties.

They don’t, but they do beautiful design work, and it’s been a wonderful partnership working together.

I have not been. But we have been in dialogue with individuals in Ukraine, and members of Sunflower Network have made the trip multiple times. There are concerns about CannonDesign employees traveling to active war zones, as you can imagine.

For sure, and when the moment is right, I would love to go. I fully intend to go for the ribbon cutting. We’re hopeful that the war will be behind us as soon as possible.

It’s in Western Ukraine, in a relatively stable area of the country very far away from current active fighting, which is why we selected it. It’s located about a thousand kilometers from the front lines, a rural community about 70 kilometers or 80 kilometers from the Polish border. It’s an area that we feel is a relatively safe place to build. It’s also a region that has received a huge influx of refugees from Eastern Ukraine, so you have a health system that was already in need and is now even further strained. 

Absolutely. I’m the principal in charge of well over a billion dollars’ worth of healthcare construction, and virtually every project involves some form of modular prefab construction. There are advantages to this form of project delivery relative to speed to market, budget, quality, and other key factors.

I’ve been involved in design meetings with the local Ukrainian architectural engineering team and the hospital director. I’m also involved with the meetings with the mayor of Brody, in Ukraine, and city officials, and with the full team, which includes our Polish builder and manufacturer, Climatic.

The meetings with the hospital, the local design team, are a combination of Ukrainian and English. Our engineer from CBM Forum is fluent in English and Ukrainian. So we present, virtually, to the hospital director and the local architectural engineering team. We present, pause, and the engineer translates, back and forth. The meetings do take about twice as long. But one of the coolest things for me: we’re designing this collaboratively with the local team. We’re not just designing and presenting it to them. We’re presenting design ideas, healthcare planning concepts, and working together because they’re bringing the expertise of their local community.

Exactly. And when things really resonated, you could see Miroslav, the hospital director, just lighten up the space and get excited and start sidebarring in Ukrainian with the architectural engineering team. It was a great process. That local team also brings deep knowledge of the codes and requirements of the Ministry of Health in Ukraine that we need to meet. 

Resilient. There’s excitement and appreciation that Sunflower Network is helping them build this pediatric hospital. It’s desperately needed. And there’s a real appreciation that the world cares and that they’re not alone.

They do. There’s a kind of steely resolve to continue living their lives. That’s another reason why it’s so important to be building this now and not wait for the conflict to be over. It’s been three years, and people are still living, getting sick, needing treatment. So we can’t wait. As the mayor said, this facility will be a real beacon of hope.

We have two phases. Phase A is 960 square meters, and then it nearly doubles for the second. That includes the basement as well as the bomb shelter, which is a big, but necessary, cost. 

Yes. There are other countries—Israel, for example—that require those as well in new hospital construction. Another thing: in Ukraine, they do not require sprinklers in their hospitals. We’re sprinkling this building to protect the investment. 

The total timeline for construction is six months, including all of the site work, new connecting roads, parking, drop-offs, and utilities that the city is funding. And then the other work that’s done non-prefab modular is the bomb shelter in the basement. The actual modules can be completed very quickly. Climatic actually can complete, if they needed to, all of the modules in a week. We’re hopeful the project breaks ground later this summer.

Yes, but there can be long lead times. The longest lead time items are the doors and windows and some of the mechanical equipment, which has a six to eight week lead time, which isn’t nearly as bad as what we’re seeing sometimes here in the U.S. steel is readily available. And I believe they stock other products in their manufacturing facilities, so they can build with amazing speed. 

The concrete work and site work is being done in Ukraine. Climatic has an affiliate construction company, a local company in Western Ukraine, that they work with that will do much of the site and concrete work. But all of the hospital is being manufactured in Poland: walls, structure, floors, interior fit-out, ceiling, and then they’re shipped to the site, so 90% of the construction happens in their manufacturing facility, and the remaining 10% on site for finishing and connecting the modules.

Absolutely. That’s the intent. Once this is built and fully detailed by Climatic, it almost becomes a product. Then you’re cutting out an enormous amount of design time to build this anywhere else. You would accommodate the new location, and then you would adjust the modules and reconnect and reconfigure them based on what those programmatic needs might be in that community. But this is a community hospital, so they’d be very similar. This would be an amazing way to quickly replace critical healthcare infrastructure in America and across the world.

Exactly. What we’ve designed meets the Ukrainian codes, as well as EU and global best practices. We could easily take this and translate it across the United States for rapidly replacing healthcare infrastructure following floods, hurricanes, tornados, and other disasters.

Incredibly high. Climatic has built hundreds of hospitals across Poland and Europe. The finishes and the products and the standards are right on par with what we build here in the United States. The craftsmanship will be incredible. That’s one of the nice things about prefab modular: You’re working in a controlled environment, and there’s more repetition than what you have in traditional construction methodology. So you achieve heightened quality because of all the controls in a manufacturing process.

This is a community hospital. The plan is to start in cities and regions that are more stable, and then build out across Ukraine when the fighting subsides. This is our proof of concept. Sunflower Network has a lot of aid organizations and philanthropy they’ve been coordinating with who are interested in supporting this methodology, as a way to quickly replace critical healthcare and food structure. 

All images courtesy of Pelli Clarke & Partners.