In 2023, a new building rose to prominence on a pediatric hospital campus in Philadelphia. The academic tower — known as The Hub — connects clinical spaces with research functions and is a key component of the healthcare organization’s strategic master plan.
Design for The Hub focuses on enhancing caregiver connectivity through its physical connection to the adjacent advanced pediatric care center, and staff wellbeing through design elements that prioritize healthy environments and the user experience.
Powerful upgrades
To accommodate the new 560,000-square-foot tower and enable the client’s 30-year master plan, expansion of the Central Utility Plant (CUP) was required. The CUP provides steam, chilled water, fuel oil and electricity to the campus, including the main hospital. The expansion of the existing systems consisted of rerouting 50,000 gallons of cooling tower capacity through the core of the tower up to The Hub’s roof, over 350 feet above grade. These cooling towers support four new (ten total) medium-voltage chillers that supply chilled water loops to the tower, existing hospital and future campus buildings.
Similarly, the CUP now houses six additional, 9 PPM, state-of-the-art dual fuel boilers, providing a resilient and redundant heating source across the campus. Completing the loop, condensation from these boilers is reused and routed back across the campus.
The existing multi-generator plant was also overhauled, with a total of four 4.160kV, two-megawatt diesel generators installed in parallel to support hospital operations. Two new primary PECO Energy Company electric services were added to the existing four dedicated PECO lines in the CUP. By tying this infrastructure together with modern controls, the design team was able to reliably and efficiently provide critical power, heating and cooling for the campus for years to come.
Finally, our sustainability experts managed the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification process, while further enhancing efficiency through energy modeling that refined the building’s envelope design in the early phases of the project, giving the facade its signature waving glass appearance.
