Prodded by the intuition that architects can do more with wood than they’ve had the opportunity to show, architecture critic at New York Magazine Justin Davidson asked four firms to come up with a speculative but realistic public project for New York that would take advantage of wood’s inherent warmth, elegance, and versatility. 

The point of this exercise was to help visualize what New York might look like if it embraced timber with the same forward-looking enthusiasm that it once lavished on steel and reinforced concrete.

ZGF answered Davidson's request with the Harlem Community Healthcare Center. Leveraging our extensive healthcare design portfolio and decades of mass timber experience, from airports to labs, we concepted a four-story community health building that leverages the benefits of wood for America's most diverse and densly populated city.

Davidson writes of our design, "Most health facilities, whether they’re research hospitals, ERs, or urgent-care storefronts, tend to retreat from public life. Walk through the automatic door in those places, and you expect to enter a medicalized habitat defined by molded plastic, stainless steel, white light, and the pervasive smell of bleach...By contrast, ZGF invites patients and families into its multilevel forest. In an upstairs atrium, another tree reaches up to a wooden trellis and a skylight above, where it comforts the afflicted with architecture’s two most powerful tools: sunlight and beauty."

Read the full article in Curbed here.