Healthcare Design: A Hospital is Like a Small City

In this series, members of our core healthcare team discuss design philosophy and current trends in healthcare design.

PAYETTE’s approach to the design of hospitals involves a deep dive into the culture of each institution and the particulars of place. We think of hospitals in an urban way, like a small city that needs streets, boulevards, parks and neighborhoods to give it a sense of organization and structure. This helps to define a campus, a sense of arrival and a sense of place.

The concept of embedded nature is also integral to how we think of the design and organization of the clinical spaces, waiting areas and recovery spaces in hospitals. We are passionate about bringing nature deep into healthcare settings, linking clinical spaces with nature and natural light. We believe that there is great value in doing this and work diligently to organize clinical spaces around a sequence of internal green spaces that can take the form of healing gardens for cancer infusion, green roofs or even hanging gardens in a high rise urban environment.

Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center Medical Center Children’s Hospital

Our designs for Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, the Fifth XiangYa Hospital, Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and the Boston Children’s Hospital all explore these themes.

Boston Children’s Hospital

For example, the James Mandell Building at Boston Children’s Hospital brings a quiet, dignified silhouette and focus to the streetscape, while capturing the vitality and energy of one of the world’s best children’s hospitals through its embedded nature features. A hidden jewel, the “hanging garden,” located in the center of the complex, is a quiet oasis suspended six floors above grade. The courtyard garden, carved from the center of a dense urban block, brings abundant natural light into the core of the new building and also becomes a focal point for rooms in the existing main building. As an urban design element in the hospital floor plate, the courtyard defines a vibrant sense of place and an intimate community for the inpatient units (existing and new) that surround it. Located on the sixth floor adjacent to the Bone Marrow Transplant Inpatient Unit, the courtyard provides a visual refuge for patients, families and staff. Configured as a flexible series of outdoor rooms adjacent to the main corridor and family lounge, the courtyard is a secure visual extension of the inpatient unit.

Related Posts: 
Why We Design Hospitals …
Embedded Nature: Boston Children’s Hospital Mandell Building
Spotlight on Children’s Hospitals