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Designed collaboratively by Perkins Eastman and Chan Krieger, Hebrew SeniorLife’s new senior care community creates an intergenerational campus with a variety of housing options for the elderly.The new campus, located on 162 acres of environmentally fragile land along the Charles River west of Boston, is the home of approximately 750 ageing adults. The site also provides a setting for 450 students in the Rashi School and ancillary play and athletic fields. The living accommodations include 50 cottages, 24 villa apartments, 182 apartments, 51 traditional assisted living apartments, 40 memory support rooms, and a 268-resident healthcare centre with 220 long term care residents and 48 sub-acute patients.
The site was carefully sculpted to preserve as much of the natural beauty as possible and to utilise the rock-laden topography and mature trees to compose and frame campus views. The simple connected forms are executed in natural materials such as cedar, copper and bluestone. Working together with an abundance of glass in the enclosure, exterior materials were extended into the interior to blur the distinctions between interior and exterior. The overall aesthetic created reflects the New England architecture that surrounds the site.
With sustainable design features equivalent to LEED certification, the multigenerational campus features an environmentally responsible design approach abounding with restored meadows, protected wetlands, and walking trails. Newly created open space was used to cover the community's parking under a green roof and provide a below grade pedestrian connection. Through xeriscaping (landscaping which reduces the need for irrigation) and a rainwater collection/cistern system no ground water is utilised for irrigation.
The community utilises New England’s largest closed-loop geothermal heating and cooling system, which compromises 400 heat transfer wells. The system is anticipated to generate a 50% savings in natural gas consumption while reducing CO2 emissions by almost 35%, the equivalent of 18million lbs per year.