Danvers, MA – A ground breaking celebration was held today for the new Mass General/North Shore Center for Outpatient Care in this North Shore community outside of Boston.

The 122,000-square-foot outpatient facility and 80,000-square-foot medical office building are a joint project for North Shore Medical Center (NSMC) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). The center will provide the latest in cardiac diagnostics, suites for minimally invasive surgery, and advanced imaging services, as well as serve as the expanded home of the new MGH–NSMC Cancer Center.

North Shore Medical Center President and CEO Robert G. Norton and MGH President and CEO Peter L. Slavin, MD, spoke at today’s ceremony. More than 150 guests signed ...[more]

Design is now underway for Bridgeport Hospital’s Park Avenue Campus Outpatient Center in Trumbull, which will provide a new level of access to quality outpatient care in southwestern Connecticut.

The center’s range of services will include a comprehensive cancer center, including medical oncology and radiation services and a breast care center, ambulatory surgery, gastroenterology services, full service radiology, a Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital Specialty Center, rehabilitation, and other physician offices. The new facility will create a welcoming, accessible outpatient care campus, joining two existing buildings that house radiation oncology and medical offices, in a park-like suburban setting.

The garden-level cancer center emphasizes patient privacy and healing, with a dedicated entrance and parking ...[more]

Creating an environment that promotes healing complements the development and practice of treatments that heal. That was the thinking behind the design of Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven Hospital, which has received an Award of Merit in the Connecticut Green Building Council’s (CTGBC) 2011 Green Building Design Awards. Norman Roth, Yale-New Haven’s Senior Vice President of Administration, accepted the award at the June 21 ceremony in New Haven.

The hospital was designed by Shepley Bulfinch and landscape architects Towers|Golde, and built by Turner Construction.

Eight years in the making, the 516,000 square foot cancer hospital ...[more]

BOSTON, MA – Boston’s landmark Ames Building, completed in 1893 by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, opened as The Ames Hotel at a gala event hosted by The Morgans Hotel Group last night.

The transformation of the office building to a 114-room boutique hotel followed an extensive renovation. The 13-story building, located between the Old State House and Boston City Hall, is considered Boston’s first skyscraper. It remains the second tallest building of masonry load-bearing construction in the world..

The Ames Building was also home to Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge beginning in 1893 to 1981, the first in an ongoing Shepley tradition of occupying buildings of its own design. As Shepley Bulfinch Richardson ...[more]

Colleges and universities that are looking for ways to improve energy efficiency and resulting cost savings are realizing that some habits start from the ground up, as discussed in “How to achieve a tight building envelope,”� which appears in the June 2012 issue of College Planning & Management.

In the article, Jonathan Baron talks about the value to owners of investing in building component mock-ups and building commissioning, as well as the importance of evaluating the compatibility of different materials used in creating the building envelope.

Jonathan’s remarks on building ...[more]

Last week’s publication of the 2012 International Green Construction Code (IgCC) marks a major milestone in sustainable design, construction, and operations, as we shift from an incentive-based approach toward a regulatory one.

While current building codes were developed to protect life and safety of present building occupants, the IgCC expands its purview to protect the environment on behalf of the wider community, both present and future.  This new overlay code builds on current systems of voluntary design guidelines and goals, moving toward mandatory adherence to principles of sustainable ...[more]

Why do buildings last? How do we design flexible spaces that can change and adapt? 

A team from Shepley took on this question as part of the Open Building conference at Build Boston last month. The conference tasked three firms – Shepley, Payette, and Cannon – to propose a building that would evolve over time to house multiple uses on a large scale site in Somerville. We took the long historical view and, after a week of exhaustive debate, found that architectural systems which are designed to change rarely work or ...[more]