Healthcare Architecture as Infrastructure: Open Building in Practice

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subject to alteration, the standard approach of defining required functions and practices before acquiring facilities is obsolete.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.

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.