Architecture is a powerful tool for community building. This story about the Park Street Clinic in New Haven demonstrates how a building can not only be used to help heal the sick but the community as well.

Laboratories don’t usually stand out as works of architecture; most are tucked out of sight. The new Park Street Clinical Laboratory in New Haven, however, is something else entirely—a building that not only aids medical diagnoses but is a quite visible attempt to heal longstanding physical and psychological rifts in the surrounding community.

The latest addition to the Yale-New Haven Hospital complex—one of the most respected and heavily used medical campuses in the country—the six-story Park Street building was privately developed by Fusco Corp. and leased to the hospital. It is one of three close-knit structures in a $627 million expansion, including the Smilow Cancer Hospital that opened last fall and a garage plus apartment building for patients’ families completed in January. The lab’s randomly checkered façade of gray panels and yellow, orange, white and clear glass is designed to glow day and night as a beacon on the western edge of the medical campus looking toward downtown New Haven. Wedged between the gargantuan, 9,000-car public Air Rights Garage and the new hospital across the street, it is also the entry portal for 1,000 or more cancer patients arriving by car each day for treatments.

Click here to read the entire article from The Wall Street Journal.