The current COVID-19 pandemic has led to elevated cleaning protocols with harsher cleaners, resulting in product failures. As healthcare designers, it is our responsibility to design spaces that protect the health, safety, and welfare of patients, visitors, and staff.
Virtual reality is becoming essential in healthcare design, giving healthcare providers the opportunity to walk in a space before any change, cost, or interruption is made.
WELL complements sustainable building standards and is “a vehicle for buildings and organizations to deliver more thoughtful and intentional spaces that enhance human health and well-being.”
One of the unintended consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and extended lockdowns has been unused office space resulting from employees working from home. Health systems are not immune from this trend, especially with their administrative teams.
Many buildings today are clad with aluminum skins, crisp metal panels in both simple and complex shapes, with limitless color options. To install it in a code-compliant manner, however, requires understanding the various types of aluminum skin and their restrictions.
Our clash prevention process provides useful information to the design team to improve our projects’ constructability and improves design team coordination. The value that clash prevention brings hinges on how useful the clash report is to the team.
Communication and organization are key in the CA phase of every project, ensuring that the design firm, engineering firms, contractors, and client remain on track.
Architects and designers are immersed in a challenge to create healthier built environments that address the coronavirus pandemic concerns. This challenge is reshaping our design approach both immediately and long-term.
As we continue to help clients with their ability to prepare for or deal with patient care surges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we wanted to share the influences we expect will impact design trends in the future.
The appropriate mechanical design solution for normal hospital operating protocol will need to be balanced against the reality of a pandemic response that presents a different series of patient care requirements.
