We are pleased to announce that Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Chestnut Hill is the recipient of an IIDA Healthcare Design Award. The Healthcare Design Awards honor excellence and originality in healthcare interior design that is exemplary of extraordinary innovations in design concepts across 14 categories.
Projects were reviewed by a panel of healthcare design professionals, including former President of IIDA’s New York chapter, Elsie St. Léger, IIDA; HDR Senior Interior Designer Professional Associate, Kelley Dorsett, IIDA, CHID; and AECOM Senior Vice President and Interior Design Director, Americas, Brett A. Shwery, FIIDA, AAIA, CID.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Chestnut Hill is a comprehensive outpatient cancer center. Bright and welcoming, the 140,000 GSF adaptive reuse of a former retail site creates a setting to strengthen team-based clinical care. The space is fundamentally patient focused through a design that brings light, shelter and connectivity.
Three themes – shelter, light and connectivity – guided the team and owner to an elegant and flowing solution. The manifestation of these concepts nurtures patient and staff wellbeing. As a fundamentally patient focused facility, the design is an antidote to the most stressful and challenging of life experiences. A series of tactile elements, such as the undulating wood benches, walls and soffit panels, bring a coherence to the project, visually and physically embracing occupants. Far from sterile, soft sculptural soffits, reception desks and nurses’ stations evoke a gentle touch. Radiused walls and corners guide fluid movement and circulation. Together these elements create a sheltered, protected and healing patient experience.
Daylight is a guide throughout the facility. The sun filled atrium unifies and animates waiting and circulation areas, with iconic new skylight enclosures casting diffuse and dappled shadows. Examination and treatment pods radiate outward, framing orienting views of nature. The layout also strengthens collaboration and staff well-being. Utilizing the perimeter provider team workspaces to link “off-stage” staff zones, these sunny spaces enhance communication and enable teams to work together to support a one-day, one-location patient visit.
Sandrine Héroux, Sophie McKenzie, and Emily Chowdhury are each members of our in-house Fabrication team. Their day-to-day work centers on a simple question: what changes when design becomes something people can physically test?
These women challenge the notion of fabrication as a support service, framing it instead as an essential component of architectural authorship, a way to test ideas, share agency, and widen the boundaries of what architectural practice can include.
In our most recent blog, they discuss their individual paths in architecture and reflect on their experience using fabrication as a tool for fostering shared agency, community engagement and broadening the role of the architect. Link in bio!
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