What Does Award Winning Healthcare Look Like in 2020? Just Ask the Project Team Who Built MSK Nassau

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Nassau has received an award for best in design by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Academy of Architecture for Health (AAH). The annual competition rewards the best of healthcare building design, healthcare planning, and healthcare design-oriented research. In particular, the award recognizes cutting-edge designs that help solve aesthetic, civic, urban, and social problems while also being functional and sustainable. It’s no wonder MSK Nassau succeeded in taking home the award.

About MSK Nassau

MSK Nassau is part of a growing network of new construction and renovations aimed to better accommodate its patients and research programs, and cater to those living outside New York City. It offers comprehensive oncology services, including surgical and radiation consultations, as well as a number of specialized services, such as pain management, survivorship services, and nutrition counseling.

Drawing on hospitality concepts, the design creates a unique ambulatory cancer treatment facility in Long Island’s Nassau County that allows the center to deliver efficient and state-of-the-art treatment while remaining warm and inviting. Most interactions between patients and staff are held in intimate spaces found throughout, reinforcing the center’s personal approach to care. In an effort to provide patients choice and a level of distraction, each room in the facility is reminiscent of residential settings. The library features live-edge wood that forms oversized periodical displays and access to adult coloring books, while the veranda ushers daylight in through its large exterior windows and its luminous mesh ceiling. The game room’s bold colors invite patients and families to unwind with a board game or round of foosball.

Patients arrive through a hotel-like drop-off area and garden. The garden surrounds the building and toggles between formality and simplicity, eventually giving way to screening/healing spaces. A series of alternating solids and voids, the facility’s façade, volumes, and terraces echo residential typologies. Inside, their articulation further defines the interior public and waiting areas.

As a response to the surrounding expanses of parking and suburban retail, the team turned the medical treatment zones inward to create an internal “backyard.” Natural light floods the zones through skylights above, and textured wood panels elevate the atmosphere by referencing backyard walls. Staff work at stations that evoke garden rocks and allow for close observation of patients. Special attention was paid to the infusion rooms, which feature patient chairs that are oriented toward the light from the windows. Lounge spaces outside the private infusion rooms offer patients opportunities for rest or socialization. (Source)

Project Team

• Architecture and Interior Design, Lighting Engineers, Schematic Planning: EwingCole
• Engineer – Civil : RMS Engineering  
• Engineer – MEP: Lizardos Engineering Associates, P.C.  
• Engineer – Structural: Silman Engineers  
• Contractor: Hunter Roberts Construction Company  
• Landscape Architect: Cairone and Kaupp