Hudson Valley Hospital Center (HVHC) officials claim an internationally known New York City architectural firm was a negligent malpractitioner when it designed a new building for the Cortlandt Manor hospital that did not comply with state and local building and safety codes. The hospital seeks a court judgment requiring the firm, Perkins Eastman Architects P.C., to pay an unspecified amount in compensatory damages and additional costs.
The design errors resulted in extra work costs and construction delays that put the project more than $2.2 million over budget, attorneys for the hospital claim in a complaint filed in March in state Supreme Court in Westchester County.
Completed in 2010, the approximately $110 million project added more than 100,000 square feet of space to the 128-bed hospital on Crompond Road. The project included construction of a four-story, 83,000-square-foot patient tower.
Perkins Eastman signed a contract with HVHC in 2005 for the architectural and interior design work. The 32-year-old planning, design and consulting firm has designed numerous health care facilities nationwide, including the Elizabeth Seton Pediatric Center in Yonkers, a 165,000-square-foot residence and treatment center for medically fragile children that opened in 2012.
The Hudson Valley Hospital Center project is featured in a photo gallery of Perkins Eastman”™s health care portfolio on the firm”™s web site. But attorneys at Nixon Peabody L.L.P., the Long Island firm representing HVHC, claim the firm was negligent, engaged in professional malpractice and breached its contract with the hospital when it failed to design the project to be compliant with state and local building and life safety codes and failed to provide HVHC with accurate information regarding its performance under the contract.
“As an architectural firm with specialized expertise in the design of health care facilities in the state of New York, Perkins had an obligation to perform its design services pursuant to a high standard of care,” the hospital complaint stated. Hospital officials negotiated a special provision in the architect”™s contract that required the firm to provide its services “in accordance with industry-accepted professional architectural standards appropriate for the size, complexity and other characteristics of the project in the jurisdiction where the project is located.”
The design lapses led town of Cortlandt officials to deny the hospital a building permit as project construction was about to begin, according to the complaint. The town”™s rejection caused a delay of more than two months while the project was redesigned to add required features, including a new stair tower, a revised design for the stair tower foundation and smoke and fire walls throughout the hospital.
The redesign for code compliance added about $2.2 million in project costs in the form of extra work and construction delays, resulting in a budget overrun of about the same amount, according to the complaint.
And because Perkins “missed” the code compliance issues, HVHC “lost any chance of either stopping the project or redesigning the project to meet its budget,” hospital attorneys claimed.
HVHC officials also negotiated another special contract provision by which Perkins agreed to fully indemnify the hospital against all damages, including attorneys”™ fees and defense costs, caused by the firm”™s negligent performance.
Attorneys for Perkins Eastman in February filed a motion to partially dismiss the hospital”™s original complaint brought in January. Three allegations that defense attorneys argued should be dismissed were dropped from the amended complaint recently filed by hospital attorneys.
Attorneys for the architect said HVHC refused to pay Perkins Eastman”™s final invoices when the expansion project was completed.
