The Toppel Center is a skilled nursing building replacing the original building of the Miami Jewish Home & Hospital campus. This is the sixth building that this architectural team has designed on the campus, slowly transforming it from a collection of unlinked buildings into an interconnected inner and outer quadrangle around open space and circulation. It offers a flexibly sized nursing unit that can vary from ten to forty beds, with requisite nurse call and spatial organization to allow such versatility. This is the first time that such a high degree of operational flexibility has been designed into the basic floor plate.
The 106,000 square foot building is three stories, concrete and stucco. The exterior character of the building is reminiscent of the architecture of Miami Beach’s better art deco apartment houses and hotels. The building’s siting and functional divisions give it two parts. A three-story atrium divides the chassis of the main nursing home from the physical therapy rehab center. This frames a “rehabilitation court” – two series of short exercise routes organized in centrifugal paths for resident seeking to improve their walking skills.
Toppel Center has been featured at national conferences and has won design awards.
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