Crews on their game while building Bellin’s new orthopedic clinic

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When your neighbor is Lambeau Field, you have to be at the top of your game. The contractors working on Bellin Health’s Sports Medicine & Orthopedic Clinic were exactly that.

The clinic, standing in Green Bay’s new Titletown District, overlooks Lambeau Field and is near other new developments, including an ice-skating rink, tubing hill and Lodge Kohler.

Anders Sandli, an architect with Somerville Inc., said an integrated-design process was used to plan the over 50,000-square-foot clinic.

“We sought out the different stakeholders — doctors, nurses, housekeeping staff — to get their perspective,” he said. “We wanted to make sure everyone’s voice was heard.”

Doctors believed it was essential to have exam rooms and imaging on the first level. To make that a reality, the large physical-therapy area, which Sandli said is “just like a gym,” was placed on the second floor. The area includes a basketball court, turf fields, a track, running lab and pitching lab for athletes of all abilities.

“We knew that gym would be noisy so we had to take care with the design,” Sandli said.

Jessica Mayer, project manager at Miron Construction, said two systems were installed to prevent sound from being transferred from the top floor to the one below. On the first floor, a ceiling system used spring-like contraptions to absorb sound waves. On the second, a floating floor system helps control sound.

“The (first floor) system was the most challenging of the two because anything that needed to be hung above the ceiling needed to hang off one of these springs so they wouldn’t transfer the sound,” she said. “A large amount of pre-planning and coordination was needed by all contractors to make sure the system got installed properly and Bellin got the desired quietness on the first floor.”

The second level’s floor system includes a sound-isolation blanket with springs sandwiched in between two layers of concrete floor, Mayer said.

“The floating floor allowed for a second barrier to stop the sound waves from traveling from the gym down to first floor,” she said.

Standard materials were used in atypical ways throughout the project, Sandli said. He said rust-colored utility brick and precast concrete were placed in such a way that it merged with planes of interlocking zinc panels and the project’s many windows.

“We also used the same brick as (Lambeau),” Sandli said.