architecture studio | summer 2020 | instructor: thomas hahn, ph.d | site: springfield, oregon

Project brief 

The project for the studio is the design of a multi-family, multi-story facility intended primarily as short- to medium-term housing units for families of patients at a community hospital, as well as associated support spaces for community gathering, cooking, dining and living. The facility also includes several units dedicated to short-term incidental housing for medical staff at the hospital that are in need of respite accommodations when working with situations that require them to be at the hospital for extended periods of time. In addition, the facility is designed to be flexible and resilient such that it can be used both entirely for medical staff, or quickly adapted to overflow or quarantine patient use, in times where the hospital is responding to broader natural disaster, pandemic or other large-scale emergent situations.

This studio explored the architectural implications and opportunities that arise in creating designs to support emotional and physical health during times of health crises, whether at the personal and family level, or at the community or national scale. In addition, as human health is closely tied with healthful built environments, and with the health of the greater environment, the studio explored a wide-range of issues of environmental sustainability, incorporating those ideas not only as functional and practical elements, but also exploring how those elements can inform, and even become, the architecture itself, while also analyzing, documenting and detailing the solutions in a structured way for presentation.