MGH Phillip and Susan Ragon Building

Boston’s biggest active construction site isn’t a tower or a lab. It’s a hospital. The Phillip and Susan Ragon Building at Massachusetts General Hospital is a $3.1 billion, roughly 2-million-square-foot clinical complex rising on the MGH campus, and it ranks as the largest project underway anywhere in the city.

Project Scope

NBBJ designed the building as two towers over a shared five-story podium. The 17-story Herb Chambers Tower will house the Mass General Cancer Center; the 15-story New Balance Foundation Tower takes cardiac care under the Corrigan Minehan Heart Center. Together they hold 482 single-bed inpatient rooms, a deliberate move away from shared rooms toward private recovery space. Turner Construction and Walsh Brothers are building it as a joint venture, with McNamara Salvia engineering the structure.

Threading a building this size onto a dense, fully operational downtown hospital campus is its own discipline. Crews have to keep a working medical center running next door, manage logistics on tight Boston streets, and stage steel and concrete without disrupting patient care.

Why It Matters

Hospitals are some of the most expensive buildings per square foot anyone constructs, packed with redundant power, medical gas, specialized ventilation, and infection-control requirements that ordinary commercial work never touches. A $3.1 billion bet at this scale signals where academic medicine is putting its capital: consolidating cancer and cardiac care into purpose-built, single-room towers rather than retrofitting aging wards.

The design also leans hard on sustainability, with strategies the project team says will cut emissions by close to 90% against a conventional hospital of the same size. That’s a meaningful target for a building type notorious for round-the-clock energy demand, and it tracks with the embodied-carbon push behind the new LEED v5 standard. When it opens, the Ragon Building will reshape both the MGH campus and the benchmark for what a modern teaching hospital is supposed to deliver.

Project Team & Details