Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital - South Building Overbuild

“WHR Architects connected immediately with our team at RWJ,” said Vincent D. Joseph, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. “They jumped right into the project bringing not only technical expertise and fresh design ideas, but a real passion and commitment to the work.”

WHR Architects was selected to design a major new expansion for the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) in New Brunswick, New Jersey, one of the nation’s leading academic medical centers. WHR Architects was the top choice among some of the most experienced and respected medical architecture firms nationally because of its direct and comprehensive approach to addressing complex site, programmatic, and structural issues.

By proposing an array of viable, cost-effective, and exciting design possibilities, WHR Architects won the confidence of Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital leadership. “We came to them not with an absolute solution,” says Tushar Gupta, AIA, WHR principal and senior project designer, “but with ideas.”

Those ideas consisted of comprehensive ways of dealing with construction challenges as well as creating what WHR calls “holistic, healing, and patient-centered environments.” Moreover, WHR’s urban approach to the design enhances the curb appeal on the facing street and conceives of the project as a new portal into the existing campus.

The hospital expansion will consist of three levels of additional bed units, new surgery units, public spaces, as well as a major new southern entry for the hospital. Due to dense urban constraints, the expansion is being proposed as an overbuild project, which, owing to the fact that it will hover over existing buildings, can pose considerable challenges in terms of how it connects to the overall fabric of the existing hospital campus and the surrounding urban setting.