Ladies and Gentlemen, I have spent way too much time at Children's Mercy facilities this year. The eleven year old started off the year (at my suggestion) playing with brothers on the iced deck one Saturday morning and busted his eyebrow open. Unfortunately, it was 10:30ish and the CMH urgent care opens up at 12. I was faced with an economic choice: an ER copay and getting it sealed up to stop the bleeding immediately or squeezing the gnash together till noon so I would save money with the much lower urgent care copay.
Want to know a little secret? I'm not really into poop, blood, or squishy exposed internal body tissues. It's why I'm an engineer and not a doctor......so I couldn't handle looking at bloody, fatty tissue and chose the ER. It was one of the very rare times where saving money was not the overriding decision maker.
About two weeks later, the four year old was the last one to get that respiratory flu going around and it turned into some version of strep so I had to hit the urgent clinic one Thursday night. When we checked in, the very nice receptionist asked us if we had been there before. I just replied "this is our first time........this month."
Unfortunately the next day his eye puffed up and we ended up in the hospital for three days trying to get the infection cured. Then on St. Pat's night, we had another CMH ER visit for croup. I can't tell you how much fun it was trying to drive downtown at midnight when the police were all over the place and drunks all over the streets......
Anyways, Children's Mercy Hospital Hill location is expanding. The red footprints show new facilities in the hospital master plan. West and Gillham are at the top of the map, north and the railroads are on the right, and south and 25th Street are on the left.
The master plan and expansion will be done over multiple phases. The renderings below show the phasing and is looking southeast. Crown Center offices are on the lower right of the rendering.
The rendering below shows what the Phase 1 main building will look like in context of the whole master plan.
This is what the new building will look like if one is going south on Gillham. Crown Center offices again are to the right.
This rendering is looking east from Gillham. North is on the left and south is on the right.
Here is a ground level view looking southeast at the new building.
Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) software has really come far and these renderings are so illustrative of the design and what it will look like. I don't use this software because I'm taking survey data and turning it into 2D construction plans that low bid contractors use to build trails. There really is no need to render a trail design.
Last year I got the chance to play with some modeling software when KCMO was one of the seven finalists in the United States Department of Transportation Smart City Challenge. The modeling software takes data from Google Earth™ with its buildings to create a base map. Then I used an internet program called SketchUp™ to pull missing buildings and insert them onto the base map. Lastly I used the road part of the software to change Truman Road from a six lane thoroughfare into a three lane street with parking protected bike lanes. Things change right about the 22 second mark and here is the raw video.
The raw video was taken by local advertising firm VML™ and put into part of the pre-final pitch. The team put together the final pitch and our team led by Mayor James almost pulled it off and made the final choice not easy. In case you missed all of this, here is the final promotional video.
It was fun to try something new and the team almost pulled off winning $50M. My point with all this is don't be too impressed with all of these renderings. If some guy grossed out by blood and guts can do this sort of thing, anyone can do it.
Children's Mercy is a tremendous asset to everyone who lives in this region. I'm glad they're expanding and this just continues the re-population and re-urbanization of Kansas City.
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