Wilmot Sanz

Wilmot Sanz is a healthcare-only architecture and interior design firm based in Rockville, Md., and it calls itself the largest specialized healthcare design practice in the Mid-Atlantic. That focus is the whole pitch. The firm plans and designs cancer centers, emergency departments, imaging suites, surgery and outpatient buildings, behavioral health units and inpatient floors, and it takes on tricky renovations inside occupied hospitals. Its partners include Robert Sanz, Rick Sasaki and Gregory Chang. The University of Maryland Medical System is a long-running client. Wilmot Sanz and Powers Brown Architecture are designing UMMS’s $110 million Center for Outpatient Care in Towson, a four-story, 112,000-square-foot building that’ll be the system’s first fully tilt-up medical office building.

The firm’s own account of its start is unusually clear about the bet it made. In 1966 John and Jim Wilmot, with their longtime colleague Rolando Sanz, set up a practice devoted exclusively to healthcare architecture, which the firm describes as a bold idea at the time. Six decades on, the specialisation has not been diluted.

The expertise list is organised by clinical environment rather than by building: behavioral health, cancer care, complex renovations, emergency departments, healthcare workplace, imaging, inpatient care, outpatient care, surgery, and women and children’s services. Each of those carries different code, infection-control and workflow constraints, which is the argument for a single-sector practice.

Two of those deserve a note. Emergency departments are described in terms of supporting swift decision-making and clinical workflow, not just patient flow. And complex renovations are called out as their own expertise, which in hospital terms means working in live, occupied buildings where a department cannot close.

Healthcare workplace is the quieter specialism on the list: the back-of-house and administrative space that keeps a hospital running and usually gets designed last.

The team page is worth reading for anyone assembling a design team, because the credentials are specific. Profiles list FAIA and AIA registration, LEED AP, EDAC, which is evidence-based design accreditation, CLSGB, and NCIDQ and IIDA on the interiors side. Robert Sanz carries the founding family name into the current practice.

Services are grouped simply as architecture, interior design and planning, with planning often arriving first on a health system’s capital programme.

The firm publishes a journal called The Pulse, and works from Rockville, Maryland, on 301-590-2900, serving health systems across the country rather than one region.