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MSKCC Koch Cancer Center Acoustic Design

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We design the way hospitals create healing environments

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Built EnvironmentBuilt Environment

Industry

Hospitals & Medical Centers

Location

United States

The location of the MSKCC David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care proved to be a challenge in designing the acoustics of this space. Located near one of Manhattan’s busiest streets, making sure exterior noise didn’t make its way to the interior was something our team worked hard to control.

 

Challenge

The new Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care, a next generation facility focused on advances in outpatient cancer care, was designed for healing. The outpatient facility in New York City occupies 25 floors and offers 231 exam rooms, 110 infusion rooms, 37 procedure rooms, and 16 inpatient beds for those requiring a short stay. The architects set out to make this outpatient care and innovative research facility as open and filled with light as possible to bring the outside world in and enhance healing. The cantilevered modules separated by terraces sounds wonderful in theory. Now here’s the acoustic reality.

The Koch Pavilion is right off FDR drive in one of the most densely packed areas of Manhattan. With a glass curtain wall being the only thing between traffic sounds and people healing, it was imperative to use glass with the right attenuation—and it took our team multiple iterative acoustic simulations to get the result just right. Because we’ve designed dozens of health care facilities and hospitals around the world—next to just about every type of problem—we knew how to achieve the best possible acoustic environment.

Solutions

Noise and vibration are major concerns for all healthcare facilities. The constant buzz from equipment, machines, alarms, and bustling activity in the hallways can cause severe harm to a patient’s physiological health. Even a miniscule unaccounted and unplanned for vibration can become a major liability in the case of imaging equipment and precise experiments. Our solution was to use our expertise and knowledge of the FGI Guidelines to weave the pieces of the puzzle together and create a design strategy that would guarantee that the structure, architecture and equipment create a healing environment that would stand the test of time.

Special attention was given to the space planning and design of the facility to contain noise emissions and minimize vibration produced by mechanical systems and sensitive equipment. Highly absorptive acoustical finishes, detailed design of partitions, and sound masking systems were incorporated to improve speech privacy and reduce noise transmissions between rooms and floors and sensitive areas.

Services Performed

The team ran advanced acoustic simulations for glass curtain wall design, applied FGI Guidelines to mitigate healthcare noise and vibration, and engineered acoustical finishes with high-performance partitions. They integrated sound masking to protect privacy and designed vibration control for sensitive medical and imaging areas.

Results

Today, the Koch Cancer Center provides a quiet, protected healing environment for outpatient care and short-stay patients. Cerami’s precise acoustic design ensures speech privacy, shields patients from urban noise, and keeps vibration away from sensitive medical systems.

25

Floors covered

231

Exam rooms secured