PennFIRST, an integrated project delivery team, is completing the planning and design process for the University of Pennsylvania’s new $1.5 billion hospital. The new “Pavilion” will be situated on Penn Medicine’s West Philadelphia campus where it will create a new public square and a focal point for all surrounding buildings to anchor the health system and create new connections between the hospital and the University campus. The official ground-breaking ceremony for the Pavilion was held on May 3, 2017.

The PennFIRST team is a design and construction collaborative comprised of global 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. An integrated team of cross-disciplinary experts, PennFIRST collaboratively worked to create a facility that is not only adaptable for future patient needs, but will also serve as a hub for community health.

The Pavilion will house inpatient care for the Abramson Cancer Center, heart and vascular medicine and surgery, neurology and neurosurgery and a new emergency department. Completion of the largest capital project in Penn’s history and Philadelphia’s most sophisticated health care building project is expected in 2021.

This new facility will allow Penn to deliver “the very best care the 21st century can offer patients—but we’re also ‘future-proofing’ it to ensure that we can quickly and seamlessly adapt what we do to help our patients in the coming decades,” said J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD, in a press release. Dr. Jameson is dean of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania for the Health System.

The new Pavilion, located on the former site of Penn Tower, will be home to about 500 new private patient rooms and 47 operating/ interventional rooms in a 1.5 million square foot, 16-story new facility. The Pavilion will be linked to its neighbors on the Penn campus, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the adjacent Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine as well as the train station via a network of public bridges and walkways, making the movement of people around the campus legible and easy. Special care was taken in the development of the urban realm creating pedestrianized routes and landscaped gardens and plazas to enhance the public experience. The color and articulation of the building façade gives a visual richness that reflects its historic campus location and resonates with the existing hospital complex.