University of Pennsylvania’s new $1.5 billion hospital is being built with the future in mind

The University of Pennsylvania’s new $1.5 billion hospital, dubbed the Pavilion, is the largest capital project in Penn’s history. It will be Philadelphia’s most sophisticated healthcare building.

The Pavilion is being built on Penn Medicine’s West Philadelphia campus. It will create a new public square and focal point for the surrounding buildings to anchor the health system. Not only is the new hospital designed to deliver the best care to patients based on current standards, but it will also have the ability to quickly adapt to any advancements that occur over the next few decades.

About 500 new private patient rooms and 47 operating/interventional rooms are included in the 1.5 million-sf, 17-story facility. A network of public bridges and walkways will link the Pavilion to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the adjacent Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine. It will also be connected to the nearby train station.

The hospital is broken down into smaller neighborhoods meant to provide a sense of community. Patients and employees will have access to plentiful daylight and landscaped views. Each patient room also has the ability to be personalized by patients and visitors.

Some of the highlights of the Pavilion include:

— Long term flexibility incorporated into the design so patient rooms can be adapted and changed over time with minimal impact to the building fabric. All the private patient rooms are uniform so the right care can be brought to them, which makes the hospital design flexible both today and into the future.

— Future in-room technologies that will strengthen communication between patients, families, and care teams provide for educational programming, and enhance multi-nodal physician consultation are all anticipated for the patient rooms.

— An environmentally conscious design, construction and operational plan for the Pavilion fortifies Penn’s commitment to the environment. The design includes innovations like the re-use of water, 100 percent outside air, optimized access to daylight, outdoor green space for patients, families and staff, and ultimately a high performance building envelope and mechanical systems.

The Pavilion Build Team consists of healthcare design firm HDR, international architect Foster + Partners, engineering designer BR+A, construction management expert L.F. Driscoll and Balfour Beatty, and Penn Medicine’s clinical and facilities experts. The hospital is scheduled for completion in 2021.

During the second week of November, the architecture firm NBBJ launched a podcast series called Uplift, that focuses on the transformative power of design. Its first 30-minute episode homed in on designing for behavioral healthcare facilities, a hot topic given the increasing number of new construction and renovation projects in this subsector.

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