E75 – Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: The Story of Relocating a Medical Campus to Best Serve a Community for the Next 100 Years
Roper St. Francis Healthcare is relocating a 170-year legacy hospital from Charleston’s peninsula to a 27-acre North Charleston site at the region’s population center, creating a resilient and accessible medical campus designed for the next century of care. Roper rooted the project in a community-informed process, expanding representation on advisory groups, and partnering with the City of North Charleston to ensure the campus reflects the needs, identities, and priorities of the people it serves.
The design team navigated a highly constrained site shaped by FAA flightpath and helipad limits (planes), active rail with vibration/acoustics requirements (trains), and complicated roadway access and queueing (automobiles). They transformed challenges into a community-centered campus that foregrounds patient access and experience through purposeful site features, public spaces, thoughtful amenities, and intuitive circulation.
Leaders from the owner and design teams unpack how performance-based structural design, optimized enclosure assemblies, and multi-hazard solutions, together with community engagement, translated constraints into design opportunities. This session shares tactics for FAA approvals; vibration/sound mitigation; roadway/entry studies; and impact-resistant enclosure strategies.
Attendees leave with lessons for designing complex hospital sites, where technical challenges, community expectations, and long-term resilience work together to elevate health, wellness, and equitable access.
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