Hackensack Meridian Health Jersey Shore University Medical Center included two LiveWall^® Living Walls in the landscaping of the HOPE Tower. HOPE Tower is the new $265 million, 300,000-square-foot outpatient care facility on the east campus of Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, N.J. The two green walls, totaling 514 square feet, were installed with the LiveWall^® Outdoor Living Wall System, the green industry’s most sustainable, durable and low-maintenance living wall system.

“Guided by a patient-centered approach to care, and understanding that a sense of well-being and peace of mind are essential to healing, we set out to create an environment for holistic care that is beautiful, welcoming, accessible, and convenient,” said Kenneth N. Sable, M.D., MBA, FACEP, regional president, southern market, Hackensack Meridian Health. “From thinking about how patients and their families enter the building and what they see as they do, to selecting colors and materials, to designing the process of care and clinical work flow – every decision we made in the design of HOPE Tower was to enhance the patient experience and promote healing.”

“The green walls are essential,” said Drew Smithson, chief operating officer, Jersey Shore University Medical Center. “They transform highly visible exterior walls, which would be otherwise unremarkable, into vertical gardens that are an integrated part of the whole landscape.”

The two living walls each measure 22 feet 8 inches wide x 11 feet 3 and 3/8 inches high. Everyone who enters HOPE Tower from the parking garage walks along a corridor with floor to ceiling windows and sees the ground level green wall in a garden courtyard that is being established with a green roof. The living wall partially covers the exterior wall of a linear accelerator (technology used in precise radiation treatment of cancers). Rather than the cold, institutional feeling of a blank, gray wall, patients, their families and visitors are invited into HOPE Tower with a welcoming, calming view of sun-splashed greenery.

Plants are getting established on the other green wall, which is taking shape as part of the green roof landscape on the outdoor terrace that overlooks the Atlantic Ocean on the tenth floor. The green wall will soften the appearance of the exterior red brick wall. With the green wall, all four directions on the terrace will have visual interest and appeal.

“By extending the landscape up the sides of the structural walls, the green walls complement the landscape design and bring a vertical element to the spaces that make the landscapes more complete,” said Chris Cirrotti, vice president and principal in charge, Dewberry, the exterior civil engineering and landscape architecture firm for the HOPE Tower project.