Insights & Solutions

Penn Medicine Radnor, designed by Ballinger, transforms a derelict suburban office park into a community-focused, sustainable, mixed-use development rooted in nature. The 250,000 SF ambulatory care center is designed for regeneration of both the site and human health. The building and its attached garage form a U-shape around a courtyard, integrating it into the surrounding landscape and blurring the distinction between indoors and outdoors.

It reflects the coordinated and on-going efforts of a team of individuals to advance it from its initial stage -- as an AIA Design for Aging Knowledge Community white paper to push for revisions to the Americans’ with Disabilities Act – to a two-phase, comparative analysis study of elders living in nursing homes, and then to efforts to get the results included in revised codes and guidelines.  

Joshi, R., Joseph, A., Ossmann, M., Taaffe, K., Pirrallo, R., Allison, D., Perino, L.C. (2021). Health Environments Research & Design Journal. DOI: 10.1177/19375867211001379.

On Part 2 of today’s episode with Dame Laura Lee, DBE, Chief Executive of Maggie's –Everyone’s Home for Cancer Care, Laura shares details of the special gardens at Maggie’s, and how thoughtfully they are designed to nourish every visitor, supporting both optimistic and challengi

What happened in 1995 when a 30 year old Clinical Oncology Nurse Specialist at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland gave chemotherapy to her breast cancer patient named Maggie Keswick Jencks?

Kelada, L., Wakefield, C. E., De Graves, S., Treadgold, C., Dumlao, G., Schaffer, M., O'Brien, T., (2021) Evaluation of an in-hospital recreation room for hospitalised children and their families. Journal of Pediatric Nursing

The play room in this pediatric hospital is the great escape. Let’s use this research and design an escape to get in, not get out.

Noble, L., Devlin, A. S., (2021) Perceptions of psychotherapy waiting rooms: Design recommendations. HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal

The results here tell us far more about what does not work in the design of a behavioral health waiting room, rather than what does work, and the authors propose some types of waiting rooms may give patients the impression that the practitioner does not care about their wellbeing while waiting.

Rubio, N., Macías, F., Gómez, E., (2021) The Children’s Council as a mean of participation in a hospital. American Journal of Nursing Studies

This study shows that “serious play” is a creative way to gain the insight of children through a design decision making process.