How do you design a hospital that can foster great ideas?

The best way to explain the Gates Vascular Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., is to describe it as a club sandwich. It's kind of a funny way to refer to a world-class hospital that's doing very serious work, but it's about as accurate as you're going to get. Much like its lunchtime counterpart, the glassy 10-story building, situated in downtown Buffalo, is layered: A clinical vascular hospital takes up its bottom floors, a University of Buffalo-run research and laboratory space occupies the top floors, and sandwiched in the middle of it all is the "meat"—a two story collaborative core that acts as an innovation hub to connect researchers and practicing physicians from different specializations.