In healthcare today, providing better care for patients increasingly means integrating complex technologies. As a healthcare leader planning a new or expanded facility, how can you construct and navigate a planning and decision-making process with such significant long-term implications? Start by asking the right questions.

To determine the required physical plant space for these innovative facilities, first define your current needs.

-       What would you like to gain or learn when using this type of equipment?
-       Do you want to introduce more than two modalities within a space?
-       How important will it be to plan for future upgrades?

Answers to these questions will have a significant impact on structural, mechanical, and ...[more]

There are some topics that keep coming up when we talk about leveraging BIM for Building Performance Analysis (BPA). In presentations to peers, clients, and students alike, discussion inevitably comes back to the applicability and timing of BPA, and the interoperability of BIM models and BPA models. What does this mean for design teams?

Last year a colleague at Vanderweil Engineers approached me with a challenge: “How do we leverage our BIM models for Building Performance Analysis?” I took the bait. Armed with the support of our firms and numerous knowledgeable resources, we ...[more]

What does it mean to have worked on one of the first Pebble Project hospitals – before there was a Pebble Project?  It’s a funny dynamic of simultaneously looking forward and back. How can we use innovative design to enhance the quality and cost-effectiveness of healthcare delivery today, in an era of lean operations and healthcare reform? How can research conducted on those innovative projects more than a decade ago inform design today?

When Shepley worked with Bronson Methodist Hospital on its replacement hospital in the mid-1990s, there really wasn’t ...[more]

2010 PKAL Learning Space Collaboratory National Colloquium. Whew! That’s quite a mouthful. I was fortunate enough to attend, and it was a great weekend of very robust discussion (and some fun!).

Under the guidance of Jeannie Narum, Principal of the Collaboratory, nearly a hundred educators, higher ed administrators, architects, planners, landscape architects, librarians, scientists, and others came together to share their knowledge and questions about “What We Know About Planning Learning Spaces and What We Still Need to Know”.

A combination of presentations, interactive sessions, small group work, the Colloquium modeled the type of ...[more]

Think you know what goes on here? Look again. Step inside Hackerman Hall, home to Johns Hopkins’ Computational Sciences program and a remarkable intellectual crossroads.

It may sound counterintuitive, but the most important thing about designing science and research facilities doesn’t actually involve design. The only way to plan for a future facility is to give a long hard look at the way you work today.

It’s a little like looking at your eating habits and stepping on the scale when you want to get in shape. It’s not easy. Start by:

- Establishing a vision and a set of quantifiable goals that will support it
- Understanding where you are today, evaluating existing facilities and current processes ...[more]

What do we mean when we talking about working collaboratively? This video was filmed in our Boston office this summer as architects, planners, and designers work through series of diagramming exercises.

Just as pedagogical and learning styles have evolved, the design of buildings that support learning are changing, too, from environments with static formulas for space layouts to those that support active dynamic learning.

A primary goal in designing a learning environment is not only to support the activities that take place within it but to encourage the activity and make it visible to those who enter the environment. This idea of taking down boundaries helped accomplish that.

For Eckstein Hall at Marquette Law School this was taken forward with the idea that the law ...[more]