Boston Children's Hospital Healing Garden | Boston, Massachusetts | 2019

Architects: Mikyoung Kim Design

Lead Architects: Mikyoung Kim, Bryan Chou, and Ian Downing
Associate Architects: Shepley Bulfinch Architects
General Contractor: Suffolk Construction Company
Client: Boston Children's Hospital

Photographers: Robert Benson

In the heart of the Longwood medical district, the Boston Children’s Hospital healing garden and new entry plaza are a transformative space that evinces a human-focused design. While these landscapes are the first in a ten-year green masterplan, they signify Boston Children’s Hospital’s earnest commitment to providing world-class care to patients.

The healing garden embodies the science and art of landscape architecture, providing patients, families, and hospital workers a natural environment that reduces stress while improving concentration, memory, and positive psychological responses.

Research shows that even after a 5-minute exposure to a well-designed natural environment one’s heart rate and blood pressure will alleviate promoting heightened mental engagement, attentiveness, and stress reduction, all of which elicit positive emotional responses.

Defined by engagement with the natural world and playful spaces, this healing garden transforms what was once an inaccessible infrastructural roof into a new garden on the main clinical building.

The Garden is designed with distinct programmatic zones, ranging from the quiet and contemplative to the active and social.

A gracefully arched pathway facilitates gentle movement and frames a central, grassy landform designed for free play and engagement with the sky. Colorful café seating and shade sails offer a more social space for gathering, games, or grabbing lunch in the diffused sun.

Privacy nooks screened with plant materials feature integrated wood benches while also ensuring space for patients visiting the garden in hospital beds. The most private of these nooks look out onto the Boston skyline; intended for end-of-life patients, this outdoor private garden can be completely closed off with a wood screen.

Within the larger garden space, panoramic views extend the experience of the greater Boston skyline and offer a sense of openness to those confined to the hospital grounds.

Care was taken throughout the project to accommodate immuno-compromised children and visitors of all abilities. This space was designed to ensure access for all, no matter the restrictions that confinement to bed or medical equipment may pose. Accessible paths and play areas were critical in achieving this aim, while a variety of seating solutions were provided to accommodate a broad range of physical needs.

Ample protection from the sun makes this space effective and enjoyable for the broadest range of visitors. Layered sun protection ranges from wood trellises, canopy structures, and tree cover. Canvas shade sails were collaboratively designed with patients’ artwork; leaf imprints highlight the creative arts program within this campus.

The roof garden’s meadow-inspired plant palette features traditional healing plants, including a variety of echinacea and sages, alongside a rich collection of playful perennials selected to bloom throughout the seasons from early spring to late fall. Vibrant in not only color but textures and smells, the plant material elicits a multi-sensory experience. Touch and feel plants, such as lamb’s ear, are paired with lavenders and alliums, enticing to not only hands and noses, but antennae and feelers.

To that end, special care was given to ensure the garden would provide nourishment and habitat for butterflies, bees, and birds passing through the area from the nearby apiaries and Emerald Necklace, lending their own songs, color, and whimsy to the space. Already, the garden has brought bees from the Roberchar Apiary in Jamaica Plain.

A complex new infrastructural roof needed to be built to accommodate the weight of this garden.

This expansion also required the building’s elevator core to be raised a floor for patient access, along with re-allocation of existing utilities.
A new lobby with restrooms and a garden maintenance storage area are part of this larger effort to bring a green experience to patients in the clinical part of the BCH campus.