By Alexis Kayser

Copyright newsweek

A new skyscraper is joining the skyline on New York City’s Upper East Side. With a modern exterior and a glossy, glassy sheen, it looks like it’ll fit right in—from the outside.But when the building opens its doors in 2030, something will distinguish it from the other towers that stretch toward the ceiling of Manhattan. It won’t hold corporate offices or hotel rooms, tourist-trap skydecks or luxury apartments.This building will be a hospital: a state-of-the-art cancer center that honors its purpose without contorting itself into conventional molds. That’s what the team at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is going for, although the roughly $2.3 billion project won’t be an easy undertaking.The Kenneth C. Griffin Pavilion at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center will stand at 481 feet tall upon a relatively small, 25,000-square-foot foundation. Connected by a skybridge to the system’s existing hospital, it will extend inpatient capabilities by 208 beds while keeping close to the research, lab and clinical capabilities of the world-renowned original.Those additional patient beds have become a necessity as cancer rates rise, Dr. Jeffrey Drebin, chief physician executive at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) told Newsweek. Cancer incidence tends to go up as people get older, and the U.S. is on the brink of a demographic shift. The population of adults over the age of 65 is expected to increase by 42 percent between 2022 and 2050. Nearly a quarter of our total population will be seniors by the turn of the century, according to the Population Reference Bureau.In New York City and the surrounding region, Drebin expects to see cancer rates double over the next 25 years. MSK’s original hospital, built in the mid-1970s, is already operating close to capacity. The 498-bed cancer center will need an add-on to meet the rising demand for its services, he said.”There are a lot of great hospitals in the region, but number one, we don’t think anybody’s better,” Drebin said. “And number two, even they’re also quite full.”Hence, the Kenneth C. Griffin Pavilion at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center was born—and it’s designed with the intention of shapeshifting into the future, whatever that future looks like.In the past, health care architects designed buildings from the outside in. This creates different shapes and sizes for the rooms on the inside, and doesn’t always address the operational and functional needs of the space, according to Suzen Heeley, MSK’s executive director of design. She wanted to reverse that thinking for the Pavilion, centering the interior experience over the facade.The team started by interviewing patients, caregivers and staff members of all different backgrounds, considering ethnicities, gender identities, income levels, technological familiarity, native languages and more to capture a true “cross section” of the health system’s population, Heeley told Newsweek. This informed four design “guideposts”—lenses through which all decisions are made to ensure they’re consistent with the project’s goals.Guidepost 1: Foster an “inclusive sense of belonging”Hospitals can be sterile and intimidating. MSK’s team didn’t want patients to feel that way inside the new Pavilion.”Oftentimes, health care architecture, especially with lobbies, is huge and grand, and people at a human scale feel very insignificant,” Heeley said. “We wanted it to feel more personal and that we were all about you as the patient.”The Pavilion renderings have a warm color palette, starting at the exterior entrance, and incorporate lots of greenery into the surroundings. The entryway is a few steps back from the main sidewalk to conceal it from the hustle-and-bustle.The lobby is designed to give someone options once they step off the elevator. There are people there to greet patients and visitors, but they aren’t behind a boxy desk. Although that is the standard in health care, it can lead to “a more transactional interaction with patients,” according to Heeley.”We often compare it to the Apple store, where you don’t come in and there’s a big desk that you need to check into,” she said. “There’s a person, and it feels more personal, and you feel as though you’re being seen.”There are larger areas for people to mingle, and smaller areas where they can sit by themselves or with loved ones. It was important for the designers to give patients a sense of control over the environment and the ways in which they choose to interact with it, according to Heeley. She has heard patients compare hospitalization to imprisonment, and they do have undeniable similarities. Patients clothes are taken away, they don’t have their belongings and they’re “at the mercy of whoever is leading [them] through this journey,” she said.MSK intends to extend patient empowerment into the individual rooms. They can control the intensity of the lighting, the temperature and the shades on the windows. Outlets are placed in strategic, easy-to-reach locations so people don’t have to “climb under things or sit on the floor, like at the airport,” Heeley said. There is a sleeper sofa for overnight visitors with a table they can work at, equipped with an adjustable reading light in case they’d like to work or read while their loved one is resting.Smart TVs in each room will list the patients’ agenda for the day and allow them to order food. They can also display virtual consultations with clinicians and equip faraway loved ones to join in on the conversation.Plus, every employee, physician and visitor will wear a RFID badge that automatically displays their name and title on the patients’ TV when they enter the room, so the patient never has to wonder who they’re talking to.Outside of the room, digital screens will display pertinent patient information to the clinicians (is the patient at risk of falls? Are they prone to infection that would require nurses to wear protective gear?) so they are fully prepared for the interaction before it happens.”It’s a really important focus for the Pavilion to take a place that sometimes [involves] the worst moments in an individual’s life, whether they’re dealing with a very hard diagnosis or going through treatment, and to create a place of healing and a sense of security,” Kreg Koford, senior vice president of real estate and operations at MSK, told Newsweek.Guidepost 2: “Progress is sacred”When a person has cancer, their doctors don’t always have the ability to forecast their future. MSK wants the Pavilion to help patients visualize those small wins and celebrate alongside them.”We heard, especially for patients who are on a cancer journey, that they want to see progress and they want to understand what’s happening now, but also what’s happening tomorrow and the next day,” Heeley said. “We’re thinking about how we provide spaces that convey that in some way.”This element of the Pavilion is still in the design phase, but it could mimic the setup at MSK’s Josie Robertson Surgery Center, Heeley said. The site equips patients with real time location systems (RTLS), which are like GPS trackers that track their movements throughout the facility. Many patients can only go home once they’re up and walking, and the RTLS encourages them to do so.”[Patients] go into the corridors, and we have artwork that are milestones along a circulation path, a kind of a walkway,” Heely explained. “Their tracker will register when they’ve met certain milestones, so when they’ve walked 100 feet, they’ve walked 200 feet, they see that progress on a chart, as do the clinicians.”This ignites a competitive spark in many patients and inspires them to meet their milestones, she added—having visibility into their progress encourages them to keep going.Guidepost 3: Environments should “proactively contribute” to healingA 1984 study found that patients who were recovering from surgery in hospital rooms that had a view of nature had shorter stays and used less pain medication than those who had a view of a brick wall. This led to the “biophilic design” principle, or the idea that a person’s environment can directly influence their health.In the 27-story Pavilion, all patient rooms will have natural light and a bird’s-eye view of the city. The design team is working to incorporate other elements of the natural world into the interior, Heeley said.”We’re in New York City, so it’s not as easy to have these beautiful terraces that I see at facilities in California,” she said. “We have to figure out ways to bring that nature indoors in a way, through artwork or through video, or however we choose to do that, but that connection to nature is so important.”MSK conducted research with their architects to see how people biometrically responded to the use of wood and color in a space, and they plan to reflect those findings in the design. Since there are no 90-degree angles in nature, the rooms and facilities incorporate curves wherever possible: “The human brain kind of reacts to sharp angles as a warning or a risk,” Heeley said.The designers are thinking a lot about the idea of prospect and refuge, she continued. In the early days of the human race, people grew accustomed to open spaces, like plains, that allowed them to explore and survey the landscape for potential threats. They also needed places where they could retreat, gather themselves and rest. Many of these preferences are still embedded in human psychology.Doctors and nurses are not immune to those needs, although modern hospitals don’t always support them. The Pavilion will have “respite spaces” on patient units so clinicians can step away for some solitude. They’ll be able to control the lighting, temperature and sound, without straying too far from the patients that need them. Similar spaces will be available for family members and visitors to make phone calls or process information alone.In addition, the design will offer spaces for clinicians to celebrate positive events in their own lives.”There are periods where they want to be joyful, somebody’s getting engaged or having a baby or whatever, and they feel like they don’t have a space where they can express their emotions in that way, because patients are maybe not in a place where they feel joy,” Heeley said. “We need to create those kinds of off-stage spaces for staff to be in to express those emotions, whether they’re joy or sorrow.”The Pavilion should also be conducive to the flow of traffic for providers and patients, according to both Koford and Drebin.”There are a lot of bread and butter issues in the patient experience,” Drebin said. “Patients want quiet. Hospitals tend to be very noisy. So we tried to plan what would be going on, how the doors would be laid out, where the beds would be laid out in the room…so it wasn’t noisy, so that people coming in and out had easy egress and ingress.”Guidepost 4: Be “future-facing and flexible”The health care landscape changes quickly, and so do patients’ needs. MSK wants to make sure that their investment can adapt to the times, and is creating “modular” rooms that can be easily reconfigured for different services.This helps from a quality perspective, said Shelly Anderson, president of the existing Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. Materials will be in the same place in every room, so clinicians don’t need to think twice about what they’re reaching for. The goal is to create a “no-mistakes environment,” Anderson told Newsweek.The flexible rooms can also be easily converted for different services and different purposes. The Pavilion will open with 40 critical care beds, but MSK has the ability to turn some of their med-surg beds into ICU beds if demand changes.In addition, the Pavilion will add new operating rooms that are roomy enough for the latest, greatest surgical robots, and are wired for high-speed internet and data transmission. Robotic surgery requires a surgeon to sit at a console in the operating room, at a distance from the operating table—which isn’t always possible in standard-sized spaces.”We have a number of rooms that really aren’t adequate for robotics in the current [hospital],” Drebin said. “All the rooms in the new Pavilion will have the capacity to have the latest surgical robots.”Looking to the future also requires MSK to consider environmental sustainability, according to Koford. They’re focused on obtaining an EPA Lead Certification and have made a number of design choices to keep the Pavilion “green.” For example, they selected triple-glazed glass for the exterior, which optimizes heat retention, so the building doesn’t just rely on air conditioning units to keep its interior cool. They have also included modern building management systems that will monitor for energy inefficiencies.Koford also hopes to outperform industry peers on the Pavilion’s kBTU intensity rating, which measures a building’s energy consumption relative to its size.”We’re targeting about 125 [kBTU] per square foot, which is significantly better than most, which are between 200 and 250,” he said.What does this mean for the hospitals of the past?MSK is currently applying for the Pavilion’s Certificate of Need and anticipates a review in November or December. Then, they’ll excavate through 2027 and start constructing the new facility—right next door to the old one.The original hospital has an aging infrastructure, Anderson said. Only 40 percent of its beds are private, and the hospital operates at over 100 percent of capacity for about 60 percent of the year. This means that many patients double up in “semiprivate” rooms—a common practice in the past, but not an ideal one for today’s consumers, who value privacy. The added capacity of the new facility will reduce reliance on semiprivate rooms in the original.Eventually, MSK wants to renovate the old structure to provide a universal experience for patients, families and care teams, according to Anderson.”I think this new pavilion helps us, and kind of forces us to bring that technology to life in some of our older infrastructures as well,” she said.Indeed, hospitals across the United States are expanding their renovation budgets to create environments that attract choosy patients and exceptional talent. And with Becker’s Hospital Review reporting more than 80 new acute care hospital projects that were announced in 2024, the standard is likely to keep rising into the future.In 2024, more than half of health care C-suite executives surveyed by Deloitte said that improving consumer experience, engagement and trust would be key priorities in 2025. Unlike the hospitals of today, the hospitals of tomorrow will be built around patients.”It’s just fascinating to me to think about how you could possibly curate a patient’s experience within a physical environment in a positive way,” Heeley said, “to help them feel less stress, less anxiety, and really focus on what they need to focus on in that moment within their care.”