Stantec Completes Proton Therapy Facility for Johns Hopkins

By Eric Althoff

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Design and construction firm Stantec has delivered for client Johns Hopkins a new medical facility devoted specifically to proton therapy. Dubbed the Johns Hopkins Proton Therapy Center, the medical facility is now open at the Sibley Memorial Hospital campus in Washington, D.C., directly adjacent to the new Sibley Tower medical building.

Stantec’s duties on the 80,000-square-foot facility, located in Northwest D.C., entailed architectural and interior design work, as well as ensuring that the new proton therapy building would blend in with the overall design motif of the Sibley Memorial Hospital master campus plan. This entailed ensuring that building materials utilized in the construction included brick and cast stone trim, as well as ensuring that enough natural light entered the second-floor patient area with a novel “wall of windows.”

In a bid to make the new facility more friendly, Stantec’s team ensured that the inner areas utilized “soft” coloring to foster a more pleasant atmosphere for patients such that it resembled a home setting versus a waiting room.

The Johns Hopkins Proton Therapy Center connects directly to the Sibley’s oncology wing. The new proton therapy center is also LEED-certified in the category specifically set aside for proton therapy centers.

In the course of cancer treatments, proton therapy utilizes a beam of protons aimed at damaged tissue rather than the more general—and potentially more damaging—radiation treatments. In an announcement about the Johns Hopkins Proton Therapy Center, Stantec said that the treatment has been used at various hospitals in the United States since 1990, and the last half-decade saw an increase in the number of facilities nationwide that utilize this form of cancer therapy from 15 to twice as many.

“Proton therapy has seen tremendous growth across the United States, with healthcare providers in our communities increasingly looking to connect patients with advanced cancer care,” Paula Williams, a principal at Stantec, said in a recent statement regarding her firm’s work for the facility in the nation’s capital. “We are honored to help craft this significant project in the Washington, D.C., area and are confident that its warm, healing environment will help to ease some of the stressors on patients and their families.”

Stantec also cited information from Grand View Research, Inc., projecting that, by 2025, the proton therapy systems market will hit $2.8 billion.

Stantec’s other proton therapy centers include the New York Proton Center in Manhattan, the Emory Proton Therapy Center in Atlanta, the Inova Schar Institute Proton Center in Fairfax, Virginia, the South Florida Proton Therapy Institute in Delray Beach, and the Hefei Heavy Ion Medical Center in Hefei City, China.