Better by Design?

One of the golden rules for architects is not to cram an idea into a scheme if it doesn’t fit. I learnt this as a student visiting an ‘architecturally interesting’ building in Amsterdam. As I watched the students standing in the street taking photos of the glass fronted circulation space I wondered how secure and private the women in the refuge felt – how well the architect had addressed their needs. When style and ego is allowed to triumph over the very real substance of our human needs we – as a profession – take a step further away from being relevant and useful to society, and become further devalued by clients.

I wonder how a parent, sitting with their very ill baby in this new neonatal facility, feels about the architect’s design decisions - about the sensitivity demonstrated to their needs - as they take a momentary glance out through the (north facing) mesh covered windows and try to raise their hopes...

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PULSE LAUNCHED

Architecture and Design Scotland has been working with the Scottish Government Health Directorates and Health Facilities Scotland to produce a web resource to house information on good healthcare design to assist boards in brief development and to raise awareness of the good practice being developed and delivered across NHSScotland and elsewhere.
The www.healthierplaces.org web site holds a project resource called ‘Pulse’ which showcases a growing collection of innovative and well designed healthcare environments. This resource is designed to enable and improve learning and ambition amongst healthcare clients in two main ways. It can be searched by project type to find out about similar developments in NHSScotland and beyond, raising awareness of what has been achieved elsewhere and facilitating contact to promote shared learning. It can also be searched by area to find images of different parts of developments (such as entrance areas and consulting rooms) to aid benchmarking of qualitative objectives, particularly within the new Design Statements which form a key part of the new process of assessing design in the business case.
This resource will be continually developed by A+DS. Case studies of completed developments will be developed and added. Additionally, new NHSScotland projects will profiled using key information and images information submitted to the Design Assessment Process (once the Business Case is in the public realm) and, once completed, key learning such as post occupancy evaluations. NHS Boards, and others, are also encouraged to upload photographs taken during visits to inspirational developments to assist knowledge transfer between project teams.

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