Space Use

Color is the first thing your brain experiences in any environment, because the optic nerve connects the human eye directly to the cerebral cortex. Color has a deep subconscious influence on emotions, and studies have linked positive emotional states to improved decision-making, better memory function, greater job satisfaction, and creative problem solving. As a result, space planners are looking more than ever at how interior design colors influence mood and productivity in offices, labs, and classrooms.

Boston Medical Center (BMC) is responding to the changing healthcare climate with a new facilities master plan that will redesign clinical campus space and shrink total square footage in a way that reduces capital and operating expenses while improving efficiency. The plan includes a $300 million construction and renovation project that will consolidate the hospital’s two existing campuses while maintaining the same level of services. It also provides flexibility to add 1.2 million sf of space in the future, as needs arise.

To achieve the most viable, successful workspaces, companies need to look closely at the factors that most directly influence their work culture instead of following the latest design trends, according to Kay Sargent, director of workplace strategies at Lend Lease. No single workplace design fits every company, and a workspace should fit the people using it, as well as the organizational goals.

The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) has crafted a decision-making framework based on objective standards to identify and pursue the highest priorities in a massive building boom that has roughly 95 projects valued from $10,000 to $450 million currently under construction. While a large part of that activity stems from the university’s long-range master plan, a significant portion was necessitated by the devastation of Hurricane Ike, which took 1.2 million sf of the medical school’s Galveston campus out of service in 2008. 

The renovated OB-GYN academic offices at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) eliminate private offices in favor of shared desks and open concept space, to accommodate a planned 20 percent staff increase while decreasing total departmental square footage. The department, which previously housed about 80 people in 14,000 sf, can now accommodate 106 people in 13,000 sf. The gut-and-rebuild also improves ADA compliance for the 1950s building and provides more natural light and collaborative space.

Facility managers can achieve optimal performance by “sweating their assets”—making existing assets work harder—through a careful analysis of what factors contribute to the highest throughput and then undertaking initiatives that will help them reach those goals. Doing so may eliminate the need to create expensive new space but may require facility redesign, says Cyrus Yang, executive director of delivery system planning for Kaiser Permanente.

Aiming to exit two leased facilities, backfill an owned building, and reunite departmental groups, Wells Fargo Bank successfully completed a two-year restack, consisting of approximately 40 projects that moved about 5,000 employees and touched roughly 1.1 million sf in seven Charlotte, N.C., facilities. A time-based migration planning process allowed Lori Ferguson, Wells Fargo senior properties project manager, and her team to keep the gargantuan task on track as it implemented the corporate strategy.

The three-story, 183,000-sf “@4240” building—originally constructed in 1948 as a telephone handset factory—provides flexible tenant solutions, including customized labs for both large- and small-molecule research; dry labs for electronic, medical device, or software research; and modern office space.

With an overwhelming amount of space data—collected from and managed by RFID chips, space utilization models, visual schedule maps, BIM—the best outcomes increasingly rely on the ability to analyze, distill, and communicate that information, according to Jeff Funovits and Alex Wing, principals with Stantec. This is particularly true when it comes to the design and planning of medical, research, and educational environments, where efficiency and meaningful learning or clinical outcomes are the measures of success.

GlaxoSmithKline recently engaged Computerized Facility Integration (CFI) to develop an executive reporting dashboard that will give leaders the ability to track key performance indicators (KPIs) that help identify organizational opportunities and missteps. Once developed, this strategic information will help the real estate group quickly set a course to bring rapid improvement and reduced costs.

As health science education becomes increasingly interprofessional, the design of academic medical facilities is changing to reflect this new type of learning. Collaboration is the cornerstone of interprofessional medicine, as health care providers strive to offer the best patient care. Nurturing such collaboration begins in the educational facilities where students from multiple disciplines learn the importance of working together.

Though it sounds counter-intuitive, trying to customize flexibility in research spaces may actually inhibit the intended outcome in the long term, according to Niraj Dangoria, associate dean of facilities planning and management at Stanford School of Medicine, and David Bendet, associate principal at Perkins+Will Architects. Designers should focus instead on the people and modularity, even when future research needs are uncertain and can change rapidly.

High-performance core facilities, spurred by proliferating cross-disciplinary investigations and technological advances, can benefit from the long-standing focus on flexibility that has generated so many design efficiencies in the traditional research lab, says Randy Kray, senior vice president and science and technology director of programming and planning at HOK.

With no private offices or assigned seats, not even for top executives, employees at GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) corporate office at the Philadelphia Navy Yard work in a variety of work settings. Work spaces include the atrium, the cafeteria, sit-to-stand workstations, quiet rooms, meeting rooms, and even the rooftop.

Boston College has renovated 6,500 sf of undergraduate teaching laboratories in the Merkert Chemistry Building to create state-of-the-art learning environments that support strong interactive relationships between instructors, teaching assistants, and students. The project includes three teaching laboratories for general and analytical chemistry. The dual goals were: