Project Description
NewBridge on the Charles brings multiple generations together, creates an optimal living environment for elders at all points of the aging continuum, provides a rich array of choices for elders in the form of housing options, lifestyles, engaging activity, and dining venues, and preserves a spectacular site.
This campus offers more than 1,000,000 square feet of sustainably designed, state-of-the-art residential care environments. Living accommodations include 50 cottages, 24 villa apartments, 146 apartments, 51 traditional assisted living apartments, 40 memory support rooms, and a 268-resident health care center with 220 long term care residents and 48 sub-acute patients. The site also provides a setting for 450 students in the Rashi School.
Simple, elemental, and connected forms combine with richly colored and textured natural materials to respond to the local New England vernacular and the natural setting. This simple, unpretentious vernacular was easily reinterpreted with oversized and mulled windows providing increased daylight and connections to the outdoors. With an extensive palette of natural materials and naturally-occurring colors and patterns, a cohesive design emerged that connects residents to the natural environment whether inside or outdoors.
The site design protects environmentally sensitive areas, controls stormwater, minimizes irrigation, maintains native landscape materials, captures rainwater for irrigation, and integrates the Northeast’s largest geothermal system to serve more than 1,000,000 sf of enclosed conditioned space. This system utilizes 400 heat transfer wells with projected gas savings of 50% and a 34% CO2 emissions reduction equating to about 18,000,000 lbs per year.