Development Room For Growth

A focus on flexibility is meant to foster an environment that helps patients and welcomes community members—both today and for years to come.

- Heather Corcoran

Architecture often calls for a balancing act of considering both today’s needs and the demands of tomorrow, but for EwingCole’s Philadelphia office, a recent hospital lobby project required thinking ahead in more ways than one. For the $80 million, 124,000- square-foot first phase of the Jefferson Cherry Hill Hospital revitalization, the centerpiece of a broader hospital rebranding, the architects had to build for shifting trends in health care while accommodating the hospital’s future expansion.

When the EwingCole team, led by design director Saul Jabbawy, first visited the aging complex in Cherry Hill, a Philadelphia suburb across the Delaware River in New Jersey, they encountered a collection of outdated 1960s brick buildings—with little more than a security desk to usher patients and visitors into what is often a stressful environment. “The entire lobby was a tiny little room, maybe 20 by 40 feet....Everything else was dispersed in the bowels of the hospital,” Jabbawy says. “Essentially, you arrived nowhere.”