What are the trade-offs when you design a patient bathroom? How do you navigate the balancing act of optimizing patient safety and ADA compliance?

Healthcare principal Jennifer Aliber discusses these in “Safety zone: designing the danger out of patient bathrooms” in the September issue of Health Facilities Management magazine.

The article also features two sidebars: one by Cindy Lee on bathroom design for the visually impaired and one by Ray Gerbi  on infection control.

“Safety Zone,” Health Facilities Management, September 2012

Shepley Bulfinch welcomed Partners In Health co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer (“Mountains Beyond Mountains”) to our Boston office today, where he spoke at the unveiling of plans for a new rehabilitation and training center in Haiti.

We partnered with colleagues from Boston’s healthcare and design communities to deliver this pro bono project, joining with Partners in Health, Partners Healthcare, Spaulding Rehabilitation Network, and the Mass Design Group to address the immediate and long-term demand for rehabilitation services in Haiti.

Carole Wedge welcomed 80 guests to this morning’s event. “We got as much as we gave in this process,” she said, pointing to the design response forged by a tight timetable, limited ...[more]

Shepley Bulfinch is pleased to welcome seminal design leader Scott Slarsky, who has joined the firm as a director.

In announcing the appointment, president Carole Wedge said, “Scott is an exciting new design voice for Shepley Bulfinch, with passion, vision, and a deep understanding of how design can provide clarity of purpose and mission during times of institutional growth and change.”

Scott cites Spanish modernism as a particular influence on his work, drawing from formative years spent in Madrid working with Rafael Moneo and Juan Navarro Baldeweg.  As a co-founder of designLAB, Scott and his ...[more]

What can you come up with to transform a parking lot into a community gathering place, in the face of financial and logistical constraints? That was the challenge facing design teams in the Flat Lot competition in Flint, Michigan. “Knot Lot,” a Shepley Bulfinch team submission, was chosen as one of five finalists from among 221 entries in the competition, which was sponsored by the Flint (Michigan) Public Art Project and the Flint chapter of the AIA.  Knot Lot and other top entries will be part of an exhibition opening in Flint on April 14.

Organizers asked designers ...[more]

In a provocative blog post on beauty in architecture, 2012 Summer Design Fellow Amrita Raja commented upon the reluctance of many contemporary architects to discuss the role of beauty, relying instead on more purely rational justifications such as performance. It reminded me of the 2009 NY Times article about Douglas Bowman who very publicly left his position as Google’s top visual designer because, in his words, “at Google design lived or died by data.”

Amrita’s post also reminded me of the scene in the documentary film Helvetica, where Michael Place from UK-based design firm Build talks candidly about how, for him, design is primarily ...[more]

Shepley Bulfinch was ranked 39th among the country’s leading interior design firms, according to a survey just published in the January issue of Interior Design magazine. The magazine’s annual ranking of the “100 Interior Design Giants” is based on 2012 interior design fees for major architecture and design firms around the US.

Shepley ranked fifth among education design firms, making the survey’s Top 10 in education design for the fourth year in a row. Shepley’s 2012 major education interiors clients included Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Hamline University, and the University of Houston.

Shepley ...[more]

Shortly after the buzz around the first anniversary of the opening of the Harvard Innovation Lab, Interior Design magazine announced more good news: a 2012 Best of Year (BOY) Merit Award for the Innovation Lab’s design in the Education category.

Since it opened in late 2011, the i-lab has quickly become a hub for entrepreneurs from across the campus. Ambitions for it are unbounded, as noted in an editorial in the Boston Globe in November 2012, “Success of Harvard’s i-lab could buoy the entire region.”

The Innovation Lab is the second ...[more]