In planning the new Ruth Rappaport Children's Hospital, Tel-Aviv based, internationally accomplished architect Arad Sharon is fortunate to have found in RHCC'S leadership and the Rappaport family generous patrons appreciative of his artistry.

He has translated the donors' vision for the new hospital into the language of contemporary structural design and added his personal love for the world of theater. The building he has planned is intended, he says, to be playful but not infantile and to appeal to children's intuition and spontaneity. 

The new hospital will be approached from the southeast through healing gardens. From this angle, its aluminum-cladded, glass-curtained façade is meant to suggest a simple, white box (perhaps even a toy box) whose sheer front will partially reveal the activities within.  Three exposed pillars -- painted or cladded in red, green and blue to suggest the children's game of jackstraws --  will rise 7 flights to support the building's cantilevered uppermost 2 floors, which will close the top of the box like an overhanging lid.

The architect says that he is particularly intrigued by a hospital's potential for mediating the conceptual and physical relationship between private and public experiences, and thus has planned an interior meant to contain, in his words, "three grades of activities and intimacies," working outward from the privacy of the rooms to the semi-privacy of wards and corridors and thence to open, communal spaces.

The hospital's 120 inpatient beds will be distributed among approximately 60 double-occupancy (and some single-occupancy) rooms, each with a divider for privacy's sake. Parents will be provided with a wall bed, generous storage space, and a computerized work station so that they may stay in touch with their places of employment while keeping vigil over their children.

All rooms will provide a maximum view of the sea. Moreover, each hospital floor will be color coded and decorated to express a particular theme from nature; the names when translated into English – e.g., the blue "Ocean Floor" and green "Forest Floor"
-- evoke fairy tales where children make brave, magical journeys of self-discovery through worlds hidden from adult perception.

The architect suggests that one way of understanding the building's use of interior space is to imagine an avocado whose pit has been removed. Wards and rooms will rise in tiers along the sides and back of the interior while the empty center will be filled with 2 atriums, one on top of the other.