As New Hudson Facades’ first Philadelphia project, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s (CHOP) newest building, “The Hub”, made a statement within the medical community.

CHOP is one of the highest ranked children’s hospitals in the U.S., according to US News and World Report and Child magazine. The project aimed to redefine the image and accessibility of medical care for children.

“These were extremely complicated panels in terms of both engineering and installation, less due to geometry and more due to the extreme volume of components,” related an NHF engineer. “We achieved the design vision of simplicity by moving all of the complexity to the inside of the frame so that even with 1,400 panels and every opening a different dimension, the façade is a clean canvas that captures and reflects different qualities of light as the day and season changes.”

On a busy, existing medical campus, installation had to be completed at night. Additionally, the units were too large to install from inside the floors. They needed to lift the units directly off the truck and set them with the tower crane. Therefore, the team eliminated any secondary moving of materials once on site in order to avoid unwanted obstacles.

An NHF project manager captured it this way: “CHOP wanted to do something entirely unlike what had been done before, and the New Hudson team is proud of the role we played to help them meet their goal of coloring outside the lines.”