Health care in Norman, OK, is beginning to show considerable growth. Flintco Inc. is entering the last year of work on the $100-million, 400,000-square-foot Norman Regional HealthPlex Campus at I-35 and W. Tecumseh Road in Norman.

Flintco began underground utility work on the public construction management project in June 2006. Completion is planned for late summer 2009.

Bruce Pickett, architect with Page Southerland Page, designed the hospital to complement the exterior of the initial facility on the campus. JHBR of Oklahoma City is serving as the associate local architect for construction management.

The exterior light tan brickwork will be accented by Texas limestone soldier course accents. Window glass is the same blue variety as on the initial facility in the same complex.

Innovative new products will also complement the building’s exterior. Translucent Polygal canopies at the entrances will be lighter in weight than glass or acrylic yet provide greater impact protection and resistant to weathering. Trespa, another fairly new product, is a synthetic resin panel system. Here in Norman, the 18-inch by 5-foot panels will be arranged in a pattern.

The most challenging structural aspect of the project has been the curvature of the design, according to Henry Knerr, project director for Flintco, Inc.

“There’s hardly a straight wall in the building,” he said. “It was most critical for the interior corridors. Corridor width is defined by law. We had to use six different control points on the radii, and none of them tied together.”

The eight-story elevator tower rises above the 5-story patient tower and women’s wing, hinting at future development. The concrete structure will be able to support a future three-floor expansion.

South of the hospital and connected by a pedestrian skywalk, Flintco is also building a central utility plant that will house three generators.

Water features and strolling paths are being built more frequently in hospital complexes striving for a more holistic approach to healing. Marcum Nursery has been contracted to provide an outdoor setting, including a boulder-lined waterfall along a nature walk that patients as well as employees can enjoy.

Norman Regional HealthPlex hospitals serve an 11 county area with 61 percent of patients coming from Cleveland County and 29 percent from rural areas. Cleveland County is located directly south of Oklahoma County. Norman is 20 miles south of Oklahoma City.

South of the hospital and connected by a pedestrian skywalk, Flintco is also building a central utility plant.

According to the Oklahoma Department of Commerce State Data Center, Cleveland County in central Oklahoma grew from a population of 80,071 in 1990 to 220,300 in 2005, when the last figures were available. The Data Center has projected that Cleveland County’s population will grow to 231,400 by 2010.

The trend is the same all around central Oklahoma. In unprecedented growth, health care facilities throughout the greater Oklahoma City vicinity are adding bed spaces.

This fall, Flintco, Inc. will begin construction of an 80,000-square-foot medical office building on the same campus of the Norman Regional HealthPlex on W. Tecumseh Road as well as a $70-million hospital for the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) in Oklahoma City.

Flintco has also begun construction of a $110-million hospital in Ada, OK, on the Chickasaw Indian Reservation. This is another hospital designed by Page Southerland Page.