The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Chestnut Hill Outpatient Facility was conceived to relieve pressure on the at-capacity care facilities located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston. This new site provided several synergies: convenient access for many more patients, collocation with other wellness-based functions and a facility configuration that would accommodate more collaborative team-based caregiving.
The project represents a significant achievement in the adaptive reuse of an idiosyncratic building into a full-service outpatient cancer care center. Eschewing a greenfield site, the team worked to adapt the structure to accommodate the program’s performance demands—while yielding beauty and delight.
The renovation incorporated significant integration of design inputs from multiple perspectives: the patients and their families, the total care team and facilities operations staff. Rehabilitating a former mall to house everything necessary for patient care-imaging, exam, infusion, pharmacy, amenities, lab and support service-brought serious challenges with a tight budget and schedule. Nevertheless, incorporating gentle, diffuse light; the use of warm wood elements; places of respite; and the sense of a caring embrace became the project’s guiding themes.
The project site posed numerous physical constraints and challenges. Foremost, the facility needed to be both a satellite extension of the main Longwood campus and a distinct, welcoming destination. The program brief required replication of all patient care, flow, support service lines and functional relationships at stand-alone size, including diagnostic imaging. This required clever design to overcome multiple structural challenges present in the existing building: an irregular “retail” structural grid, a deep floorplate and dissimilar neighboring tenants and a central atrium.
After more than two years of occupancy, survey feedback from patients and staff returns consistent results. The thoughtful design of this light-filled facility improved levels of patient satisfaction and enhanced care team collaborative care.
The 2025 OpenLAB Boston studio work will be exhibited at Virginia Tech Monday, March 2nd through Wednesday, March 4th.
Please join us for the following events on Monday, March 2nd:
11:00am - Lecture with Parke MacDowell
1:00pm Lobby talk with Kevin Sullivan
This year’s studio identifies seven sites along the frayed edges of Boston’s Greenway. The Greenway is a one-mile-long linear park running through the heart of the city, reconnecting downtown Boston with its waterfront. Many of the parcels along its edges remain undeveloped and present mute, blank facades to the public realm. Addressing and repairing these edges through acts of infilling, layering, grafting, framing, and placemaking is the core focus of the studio—SUTURE.