New York City’s leading cancer center creates a new model for 21st century cancer care.
Regardless of advances in treatment, earlier detection, changing lifestyles, and more, cancer remains one of the world’s most difficult health problems. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) is the world’s oldest and largest private cancer center. The center utilizes architecture and design as a partner in its 135-year long fight.
The David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is the most recent development in Perkins Eastman’s 25-year history with MSK. This company uses the entire building as an active participant in a patient’s care, with the goal to ease anxieties commonly found in healthcare facilities to improve patient outcomes.
Located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, this 25-floor building’s massing is separated into smaller volumes to reduce its size to fit the surrounding neighborhood. The connection of the volumes represents various program needs, scaled vertically from most public to more private. Setbacks throughout the façade allow space for a healing garden and green‐roofed terraces for patients, caregivers, and staff. They also highlight views and help to reduce the mass of the largest freestanding cancer center in New York City.
Emphasizing occupant health and recovery, the façade was meticulously designed for visual and thermal comfort while offering views over the city skyline and East River. Vertical fins help control the available daylight and heat gain in space. This approach created a responsive envelope that satisfies the needs of the occupants and program while creating visual interest and reducing heat loads.
Working collaboratively with MSK, the design team dared to dream about a new healthcare paradigm that departs from preconceived notions to create innovations in patient experience and treatment protocols.
Delivering almost every aspect of outpatient cancer care across multiple specialties, the center was carefully designed to help restore patients’ health and well-being. This new model of care presents a physical and operational armature for choices that align with a patient’s day-to-day feelings, resulting in a customized and supportive experience for patients undergoing episodic and long-term treatment, their families, and medical stakeholders. From the interior programming to the exterior expression to the variety of experiences within, the center makes the hospital.
This facility is home to the largest gathering of hematologic experts ever at MSK, including specialists in blood and marrow stem cell transplants, CAR T cell therapy, lymphoma, leukemia, multiple myeloma, and other blood cancers. While cancer care changes rapidly, the architecture and engineering infrastructure future-proofs the facility to ensure continuity of service and leading-edge innovation in cancer treatment.
The meticulously planned and crafted interior environment not only supports coordinated care, but also breaks the traditional rules of ambulatory care experiences to encourage next-level innovation. Sitting above the diagnostic base, the clinical floors are arranged to support efficiencies among the many different service lines housed within this one building. Configured to feel and function like “neighborhoods” of smaller, more intimate physician practices, these floors enable collaboration, discussion, and research endeavors. For many patients, this means they can receive multiple services in a single visit, reducing their stress, waiting, and travel time; for clinicians, it means valuable face-to-face connections with colleagues in different specialties.
Superstorm Sandy happened during the design process which allowed the team to ensure the flood mitigation and resiliency strategies designed into the project would adequately protect the facility against a future similar storm event. With this additional analysis, the project team came up with strategies to protect the facility against a 500-year flood, including floodgates at every vulnerable entrance, above-flood elevation mechanical equipment, rooftop energy co-generation plant, and a 25,000-gallon basement-level fuel tank protected by a submarine-style entrance and exit. These strategies demonstrate how healthcare facilities in flood plains can plan for continuity of services for patients while also decreasing energy consumption and enabling optimal efficiency.
This center was LEED Gold-certified and incorporates innovative design strategies to prioritize health and well-being, including access to natural environments, use of natural materials, and enhanced indoor environmental quality measures.
Touchpoints that borrow from hospitality and unobtrusive technology are integrated throughout the facility, illustrating MSK’s commitment to provide a welcoming, healing environment that mitigates the stress and anxiety associated with cancer care to patients, caregivers, physicians, and staff. The hospitality-inspired inpatient and infusion floors are light-filled ecosystems of private, semiprivate, and communal spaces that recognize both patients’ and caregivers’ desires for control of their environment and offer a variety of choices for relaxation and rejuvenation.
The design supports medical staff, as well, with goals to improve collaboration and provide space to attend to personal needs. Better situated conference rooms and gathering spaces enable nurses and doctors to work as an integrated team to more effectively serve a patient’s treatment plan.
