Farrow Partners + Rubinstein Ofer have completed the Middle East’s largest timber structure for the Helmsley Cancer Center, Israel’s flagship center for cancer treatment, housing patient assessment and treatment as well as physical, psychological, social, and spiritual care services. The 7500m2 center is part of the Shaare Zedek Medical Center (SZMC), one of the country’s most prominent health organizations, and comprises the first phase of Farrow Partners’ comprehensive master plan to expand the SZMC campus from ninety thousand square meters to more than five hundred thousand square meters.
Recognized as one of the most important new buildings in the ancient city of Jerusalem, the center takes the form of a butterfly: a beautiful but fragile creature whose metamorphosis from caterpillar serves as a poignant metaphor for the transformative process of treatment. With two storeys of outpatient services and educational spaces above ground, the center’s main treatment areas are arranged around an interior courtyard atrium that terraces down across three subterranean storeys to a garden. This approach aims to resemble the traditional courtyard house typology of Jerusalem.
Generously daylit by a twenty-four meter skylight overhead, these subterranean garden terraces are layered with rhythmically-positioned wood members that grow vertically from the 165-square meter garden before bending to cloak the ceiling, forming timber ‘clouds’ rising in the sky. The different densities and depths of these members create flowing wave-like planes of wood that embrace those undergoing treatment. In contrast to the joyful thrust upward and outward of the exterior timber structure, this inner space offers stillness, serenity, and silence, illuminated by the moody interplay of light and shadow from a secondary circular skylight.
The center’s timber exoskeleton is one of the world’s most complex timber fabrications to date, with elements consisting of tightly double curved beams at over a meter in depth. It is unique in Jerusalem, a city with an ancient tradition of building in stone, not timber. The project consists of 715 individual European larch glulam members and 560 square meters of spruce cross laminate timber roof panels, totaling 356 cubic meters of timber, all tied together by 2,700 concealed steel connectors. The structure and its components were designed, engineered, and fabricated by teams in six countries across three continents.
