United States
Penn Medicine Pavilion
The Penn Medicine Patient Pavilion is a future-ready 17-story hospital on the former site of the Penn Tower. The new 1.5 million square foot hospital features more than 500 patient rooms, 47 operating rooms, and a 690 space underground parking garage. It is linked to the original Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania building, connected by a new network of public bridges, tunnels and walkways.
The Integrated Project Delivery team, collectively named PennFIRST, included Penn Medicine, Foster + Partners, HDR, BR+A, LF Driscoll, Balfour Beatty, and Southland Industries was established to encourage collaboration and partnership with the owner, design team, engineers, and trades. Designated as “the job that never sleeps” our goal was to stay ahead of the curve by developing innovative solutions and working together to keep the project moving. Construction was scheduled around the clock, except on Sundays, requiring three shifts and juggling up to 900 workers in and out of the site daily. With no room to stage materials, just in time delivery was required and multiple secondary job sites were up and running prefabricating site materials to enhance the schedule and allow the team to reduce on site labor by as much as 20%.
The IPD approach allows for a level of collaboration that is not normally possible and benefited the project in both schedule and cost certainty as the team worked together in a co-location space intentionally designed to facilitate strategic planning and ensure cohesion. One example of how this approach was beneficial – while planning and designing the foundation, the team invited the concrete contractor into the collaboration space to strategically design and detail the rebar in a way that made the assembly process easier. This helped pave the way for the 14-hour, 650-truck, record breaking, largest concrete pour in Philadelphia’s history.
The facility is the largest certified project in the world to achieve Gold certification or higher in LEED v4 Healthcare and the first hospital in the United States over 1 million square feet to achieve LEED Healthcare.
Photography by Dan Schwalm © 2021 PennFIRST
COMPANY
sectors
Architect
Foster + Partners
Client
Penn Medicine
Address
One Convention Avenue
Location
Philadelphia, PA
SF
1,500,000sf
Contract Type
IPD