Boston Children’s Hospital’s Hale Family Building is a 595,000 square foot, 11-story addition to the hospital’s Boston campus. Designed to achieve LEED Gold certification, the building features a state-of-the-art neonatal intensive care unit, a comprehensive heart center, a clinical lab, and new interior and exterior gardens.   

The clinical tower facade had initially been designed for traditional construction prior to Island engaging as a design-assist partner to provide a fully unitized building envelope. By taking on the design, engineering, fabrication, and delivery of the complete facade scope, Island was able to prefabricate the glass and cladding systems to meet the project’s strict performance criteria. The bespoke curtainwall design addressed key issues of thermal performance (a particularly important concern for operating rooms located next to exterior walls), airtightness (to reduce the risk of airborne disease), and resilience (to enable the building to remain open during and after emergencies). 

The design of the building includes a cantilevered section above an underground kitchen and the building is tied into several adjacent structures on the tight urban campus. In addition, the building incorporates a historic facade of a building that was removed from the site of where the new building is located. The facade was reinstalled within a carefully coordinated opening in the curtainwall.

During the design-assist process, Island’s designers developed project-specific details to minimize visual impact of curtainwall joinery at rainscreen and louver systems. The team worked with architect Shepley Bulfinch to identify material finishes that created multi-toned formed aluminum cladding, UHPC rainscreen panels, and custom-tinted insulated glazing to match the hospital’s color scheme.

To meet the accelerated construction schedule, Island developed a fabrication and storage plan that enabled most of the envelope—more than 3,000 panels—to be finished and stored at our Long Island facilities, prior to the start of construction. Island also worked closely with the on-site installer from the project’s early days to coordinate delivery and installation logistics for such a challenging urban site.