Planning for the new Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital (JHACH) Research and Education Building in St. Petersburg, Fla., took place before all the building users were identified, and used strategies like identifying the business and design drivers to support collaboration, innovation, and communication. “The vision was to create a state-of-the-art space for pediatric health research and education, in a building that would draw people out of their offices and into the collaborative areas, to teach, work, and communicate,” says Roberta Alessi, executive vice president and chief operating officer at JHACH.

Clients look to architects to help them make decisions regarding the built environment that can greatly impact the future of their institutions and their employees. Doing that successfully depends on the quality of information used to make those critical decisions. Collecting comprehensive data from multiple sources, substantiating it with research, and analyzing it with proprietary software developed by HDR enables the firm to provide clients with the kinds of customized information necessary to make sound decisions and help predict building performance.