ASLA Texas Chapter Award of Excellence

Located on a heavily wooded 52-acre site, St. Michael Health Care Campus is a 318-bed acute care hospital. Buildings are oriented to take advantage of the best views of existing woodlands. Courtyards are created to welcome patients, visitors and staff, while also providing visual interest from the patient rooms above. Through these outdoor rooms, green spaces function as extensions of public areas.

Designed to facilitate healing, the hospital grounds feature a range of diverse outdoor spaces, including an amphitheater, a dining court, a fountain court, pedestrian trails, a lake, and eight other fountains. While the perimeter takes on the looser and more sublime feel of the native woodlands, the campus core becomes a more formal garden. Here the Garden of Balance forms two squares, where one is occupied by a circular amphitheater that carves into the ground, and a circular mound that builds up from the ground to form a bench occupies the other. Protruding from the mound is a stone blade that acts as a sundial and marks the day and the hour that the Sisters of Charity, the founders of St. Michael, arrived in Galveston in 1873.