Gallery / Featured Work / Adaptable Patient Environment

The A+H studio designed and built a full-scale mock-up for an acuity adaptable or universal inpatient care room that could be used in actual health care settings. It was a collaborative project involving architecture, art, and industrial design students and faculty working on proposals that address, yet attempt to rise above, the functionally focused and often sterile design solutions common in health care architecture, furnishings and equipment design today. The project attempted to reflect and support both the art and science of health care, and demonstrate that interdisciplinary design is both possible and appropriate in health care contexts.

In the broadest sense, the architectural challenge was to think and create beyond the boundaries of convention and conventional ways in which health care settings are typically conceived and constructed. In many respects the project involved working at a scale, and with elements, that blur the boundaries between architecture and product design. So we looked beyond the field of architecture at other fields involving creative and applied arts. The charge was to respond to four universal characteristics of sound architecture for health.

• Provide a setting that is therapeutic
• Provide a setting for positive patient/family/staff experiences
• Provide a setting that is functionally efficient and effective
• Provide an adaptable setting that accommodates change

In the end the goal was defined as maximizing comfort and control for the patient, their family members and health care providers. It is the lack of comfort and control that is so common in health care settings. It is the provision of comfort and control that we associate with our most positive and familiar settings such as home, and the automobile. The hospital cannot ever be like home, and what goes on in a hospital will never be comparable to how we live in our homes. Most well designed products and settings, from Apple computers to high performance automobiles, provide comfort and control without relying on superficial imagery reminiscent of homey or nostalgic objects. In fact they are often expressions of technology and performance. The task of this project was to think about a total health care setting in the same way.