The Hale Family Building, the largest expansion in Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH; Boston) history, addresses critical capacity needs and enhances the delivery of critical pediatric care in the city.
Services include core clinical support, the Boston Children’s Benderson Family Heart Center, a perioperative platform with an operating suite including MROR (magnetic resonance operating room) and interventional radiology central sterile processing, a neonatal ICU, and a complex surgery bed unit.
Located in a dense urban environment, vertical indoor and outdoor gardens are woven into the building to provide respite from the highly clinical environment. Further enhancing the pediatric care environment, “ground-to-sky” themed interactive art installations are integrated throughout the clinical spaces. These design elements together create a “healing oasis” within the BCH campus.
The interconnected indoor and outdoor green spaces create a vertical green necklace—a unique patient experience based on BCH’s Green Space Master Plan. The vision for the 28,000 square feet of new green spaces promotes the concept of hope, freedom, play, and contemplation.
Programmatically, interdisciplinary quaternary care is advanced by consolidating the heart center program within the building, creating an integrative pediatric cardiac/vascular interventional floor, and private neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) patient rooms for pediatric ICU flex capability.
Inpatient rooms feature a designated family zone and provide adequate space to accommodate both visitors and caregivers. Each inpatient unit includes two family lounges, one located at the entrance to the unit and the other adjacent to the indoor gardens. The lounges are designed as multifunctional spaces with a variety of seating arrangements and areas for relaxation, work, dining, and TV viewing.
A laundry room is located adjacent to the family lounge, and a multipurpose activity playroom is located within each unit for patients and siblings.
A project of this scale required careful planning inclusive of all parties. Over 400 clinicians, support staff, family members, and patients across 30 user groups were involved in the programming and design through cardboard city mock-ups to simulate clinical rooms’ function and interactive 3-D virtual walkthroughs.
Project details for Hale Family Building:
Location: Boston
Completion date: June 2022
Owner: Boston Children’s Hospital
Total building area: 595,000 sq. ft.
Total construction cost: Confidential
Cost/sq. ft.: Confidential
Architecture firm: Shepley Bulfinch
Interior design: Shepley Bulfinch
General contractor: Suffolk Construction
Engineering: BR+A (electric and HVAC), McNamara Salvia Structural Engineers (structural), RW Sullivan (plumbing and fire protection), Haley & Aldrich (environmental and geotech); CavTocci (acoustical); LAM Partners (lighting); Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Inc. (envelope consultant); Gates (pharmacy); Mikyoung Kim (landscape); VHB, Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, (civil); Jensen Hughes (code)
Builder: Suffolk Construction
