Herzog Medical Center is the third largest hospital in Jerusalem and Israel’s national centre for geriatric, respiratory, and mental health care. This plan, created through an extensive co-creation process, will rejuvenate Herzog Medical Centre’s campus and shepherd its expansion from 600 inpatient beds across 3 buildings to 1100 beds across 7 buildings, along with the introduction of new outpatient and community wellness services to establish the hospital as a vibrant health center for the broader Jerusalem community. The rejuvenated 15-acre hillside site, overlooking and engaging the Jerusalem Forest Valley, is conceived as a work of urban design, distinguished by a new fabric of boulevards, plazas, colonnades, and parks.

The hillside plays a crucial role in design, activated by generous parks and promenades as well as restaurants, community health and rehab facilities, children’s and adult day care, and education and research centres all integrated into the new hillside geriatric building which cascades down and up from the valley’s edge.

Underlying the campus plan is a “green hand”: the palm of the forested valley extends into finger-like parks that reach over and through campus. These greenspaces organize new buildings and define the public realm across campus. They also extend further north to organize the adjacent municipal lands into a future residential and high-tech district, linking one valley to another and creating a comprehensive recreation area for this important emerging neighborhood of Jerusalem as a result of Herzog’s redevelopment.

Approaching the new campus as a marriage of urban design and natural topography, the project takes a salutogenic stance on the architecture of healthcare by engendering a sense of coherence and manageability, instilling meaningfulness and hope, and radiating comprehensibility for patients, visitors, and staff alike.