Healthcare Design - March 2022 - 23

Rather than move forward on that plan, the team decided to spend another
few months rethinking and redesigning the layout. Among the
changes that ultimately came out of the process were elongating the building
to 650 feet to get all the patient rooms to the same square layout and
size, adding family lounges at the rounded ends of the floors to help bring
daylight into the corridors, designing two separate sets of public elevators
to reduce walking distances, and utilizing a flexible planning system that
enables the 72-bed inpatient floors to be broken down into smaller units
to respond to changing needs and patient demands. Once again, the team
built a 30,000-square-foot mock-up of the patient floor-a process that
went much better the second time around and led to getting the right hospital
built, Tasch says. " It was the best thing that ever could have happened
to us, " he says.
and room concepts with the staff. " Everyone
was seemingly happy with the direction we were
going in, " Tasch says. Taking it one step further,
the team decided to build a 30,000-square-foot
Styrofoam mock-up of part of an inpatient floor
and bring in nearly 500 hospital staff, including
clinical surgeons, nurses, environmental services
staff, mock patients, and food service, to tour
and participate in simulations and day-in-thelife
scenarios to help find any friction points that
might need to be addressed. " It was the most important
moment in the project, " Tasch says.
However, instead of reassuring the team that
it was on the right path, the process resulted in
some unexpected feedback, specifically on walking
distances, the size of the floor plate, and access
to daylight. For example, West says, while the
goal was to make all the acuity-adaptable patient
rooms identical in size and layout, the ones that
wrapped around the curved ends of the building
were more irregularly shaped, which impacted
clinical care. Furthermore, the configuration of
the public elevators in the middle of the building
meant some visitors would have to walk nearly
300 feet to their destination, West says.
DEFINING ELEMENTS
Opened in October 2021, the Pavilion features a variety of amenity spaces
on the first two floors, including a chapel, café, cafeteria, and family caregiver
center, while the interventional and patient floors are housed on levels
four to 14. Within the clinical areas, the building programming was arranged
so that ICU care and inpatient units for specific service lines, such
as oncology, are placed on the same floor to allow care teams to respond
quickly to changes in care level or treatment needs. Meanwhile, neuroscience
research and care are brought closer together through an advanced
epilepsy monitoring unit and a human neurophysiology research lab.
For the interiors, PennFirst focused on elements of hospitality to create
a welcoming, noninstitutional setting. The overall neutral palette features
natural materials in strategic locations to add a sense of warmth as
well as serve as visual cues to support wayfinding, such as copper portals to
frame the entrances to the elevator lobbies on the first floor. Wood is used
throughout the facility, starting with bigger gestures in the public spaces-
such as on the ceiling in the main corridor on the first floor or on the walls
of the elevator lobbies-to create a sense of welcome within the environment.
It's also used more sparingly on the patient care floors to denote specific
focal points, such as at the footwall in the patient room, Gally says.
The clean aesthetic also provided a backdrop for two art installations in
public areas of the hospital, including a vibrant mural by Philadelphia artist
Odili Donald Odita, which starts on the first floor and stretches up to the
second floor and down a corridor. The other work, a handmade glass sculpture
titled " Decoding the Tree of Life " by artist Maya Lin, is installed in a
quiet respite space near the chapel on the first floor and rises through an
opening in the floor to the second level. " It goes from being a very dynamic
piece at its top to a very contemplative piece at its base, " Gally says.
Throughout the facility, a priority was made to use materials, indoor
finishes, and furniture that would contribute to healthy indoor environments,
says Eileen Gohr, senior sustainability consultant at HDR (Atlanta),
using guidance from the Health Product Declaration Collaborative
and U.S. Green Building Council's LEED for Healthcare guidelines.
(The Pavilion is the largest project in the world to achieve certification in
LEED v4 Gold Healthcare.) Along with indoor air quality, the building also
was constructed with energy- and water-saving features, such as low-flow
sinks and showers and low-flush toilets, which are expected to cut indoor
water use by 30 percent. " We really wanted to deliver an environmentally
responsible contribution to the campus, " Gohr says.
Additionally, during construction, about 25 percent of materials were
prefabricated and manufactured off-site, which helped to minimize onsite
waste and reduce site congestion. Ed Hanzel, vice president at L.F.
MARCH 2022
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Healthcare Design - March 2022

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