Architects and healthcare clients are increasingly coming to recognize that, once built, healthcare facilities are almost immediately subject to physical alterations which both respond to and affect healthcare practices. This calls into question the traditional ways in which these facilities are designed. If functions and practices are subject to alteration, the standard approach of defining required functions and practices before acquiring facilities is obsolete. We need other starting points, working methods, and ways of collaborating.

Healthcare Architecture as Infrastructure presents these new approaches. Advocating an infrastructure theory of built environment transformation in which design and investment decisions are organized hierarchically and transcend short-term use, the book draws the practice and research of a number of architects from around the world. Written by experts with experience in policy making, designing, building, and managing complex healthcare environments, it shows professionals in architecture, engineering, healthcare and facilities management how to enhance the long-term usefulness of their campuses and their building stock and how to strengthen their physical assets with the capacity to accommodate a quickly evolving healthcare sector.

About the Author

Stephen H. Kendall, PhD, RA is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Ball State University and co-director of the Council on Open Building. Dr. Kendall's career in architectural practice, research, and education spans more than 35 years. His research focuses on the Open Building approach, needed to make buildings more adaptable, easier to customize to meet changing preferences and thus more sustainable. His work recognizes the increasing size and complexity of projects and the dynamics of living environments, the workplace and the marketplace where design must go beyond short-term uses and where control is distributed not only during initial planning but also over time.

Reviews

"I recommend this book! It contributes significantly to the ongoing change in the design paradigm. Using the lens of hospital development, it explores the implications of recognizing that future needs change. We need to provide both overall flexible designs, and detailed means to adapt to emerging needs. The book attractively provides interesting examples, and is easy to read!" - Dr. Richard de Neufville, Professor of Engineering Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Healthcare Architecture as Infrastructure is the book whose knowledge I wish every architect, project manager, and construction professional to read and apply. This is an excellent open building overview to improve the odds of projects to generate more valuable - and thus more sustainable - buildings." - Dr. Matti Sivunen, co-founder of Boost Brothers

"Hospitals are functionally complex and subject to frequent change over time. As such they may well pose the most difficult design challenge in contemporary architecture. This book reports on various fundamentally new initiatives in hospital design management and actual execution. They are based on a recognition of the innate hierarchical structure of human settlement. The principle of architecture as infrastructure demonstrated in practice and explained in this book is relevant for all large building projects, whatever their purpose. As such this book deserves a broad professional readership." - John Habraken, Prof. Emeritus, Massachussetts Institute of Technology

Book Information
ISBN 9780815367857
Author Stephen H. Kendall
Format Paperback
Page Count 198
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Inc
Weight(grams) 460g