The Environments for Aging conference and expo is an annual destination for professionals in the senior living space. It’s a gathering of administrators, designers, builders, front-line workers, developers, and researchers to discuss the latest strategies and ideas for creating functional and attractive living environments that meet the needs of an aging world.

Environments for Aging

Links

• Hadrian’s Blog Post
• Nanuk Technologies

To create his Originals profile Benjie was interviewed on his time at Dalhousie University. The interview was recorded and added to the university’s archive and special collections so that future students can be inspired by the actions of the 52 originals.
Benjie continues to be connected to Dalhousie through his role as adjunct professor. Working closely with students allows him to learn through his teaching and he is constantly excited to help students discover solutions so that they can reach their potential.

Featured alongside Benjie is (Former Prime Minister) R.B. Bennett, (Community Leader and women’s suffragist) Eliza Ritchie, (Former Architecture Dean) Essy Baniassad, (Astronaut) Kathryn Sullivan, and (Former Deputy Prime Minister and Cabinet member) Anne McLellan

Benjie’s 52 Originals profile can be found here

We are extremely excited to be a part of this influential project and to keep working with such a passionate and thoughtful client in St. Francis Xavier University. Next steps will be to act as owners adviser through the design build process and we are looking forward to the future of the project.

Breaking Ground at Mulroney Hall

StFX Campus Planning

Framework Plan Project

The St. John Ambulance Headquarters building is a hybrid one story building that combines several functions under one roof: administrative centre, supply warehouse, learning and teaching facility, and home base for travelling instructors.

Wood provided a familiar building material and economical choice for smaller-scaled portions of the building. The Administration wing of the project is primarily standard dimensional framing – easily adaptable and configurable for a standard office layout for private and shared workspaces. The wood trusses in the classroom wing provide column-free learning spaces and enhance the aesthetics of the exposed tongue and groove structural pine decking in these spaces. Clerestory windows are spaced between each of the classrooms’ trusses with light fixtures integrated into the truss forms themselves, providing an integrated approach to daylighting and artificial lighting strategies.

Wood, expressed as an interior finish in classroom spaces, provides a warm natural material, creating engaging spaces in which to teach and learn.

Overall, responsible use of wood was an important part of the project’s sustainability goals.

Wood was chosen to work in conjunction with steel in order to take advantage of efficiencies for different spans, provide character to interior spaces where exposed, and offer an easy to source and easy to work with material.

Steel post and beam structure provides the framework within which a curving and expressive exterior curtainwall is implemented: wood trusses continue from the interior to provide a generous and protective overhang that helps keep the interior spaces at the curtainwall comfortable, while connected to the exterior. The use of steel in this area minimized the number and size of columns and allowed them to more easily be located outside of the building envelope.

The standard dimensional framing of the administrative area was a cost-effective and easy-to-construct approach that helped keep on-site activities moving.

Plywood was used in conjunction with standard dimensional framing to provide shearwalls as part of the overall structural solution.

WoodWorks! Atlantic

The Institute will be home to at least six endowed chairs and further enhance the renowned undergraduate experience at StFX. Mulroney Hall will become the major classroom building for the campus, supporting the excellent learning environment with new spaces that support a wide range of pedagogies. Classrooms, Institute and academic offices and displays and exhibits related to the life and government of Canada’s 18th Prime Minister will be organized around a double-height forum space – intended to become a vital gathering place in the heart of campus.

We’ve been lucky enough to work with fantastic design partners at SmithGroupJJR and an engaged and thoughtful client in St. Francis Xavier University since 2015. Next steps will be for the university to continue our work with design builders they’re looking to select soon. We’re excited to see how this all develops and look forward to assisting with the next steps.

StFX Recording of the Announcement, October 26, 2016 (Images of the project at 10:24, 14:53 and 17:23)
Globe & Mail
National Post
CBC
Local Xpress

How did you get started in the Syllabus Program?
I love teaching, so when Tom asked if I would join on to help out I was pretty excited. First I attended as a guest during a few sessions in the winter. Then I joined on as an instructor in spring/summer.

What is the Syllabus Program?
For technical components of the program, students complete long-distance learning modules with Athabasca University. Design is taught in each region through studios like ours following a guideline for assignments. The graded work is submitted to the RAIC for final evaluation.

The following is copied from the RAIC website:
To practice as an Architect in Canada, a person must be a registered member of an Association of Architects in one of the Provinces. Applicants for Provincial Registration must first obtain certification of their academic qualifications from the Canadian Architectural Certification Board (CACB). The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) Syllabus curriculum has been prepared to comply with Academic Certification Criteria adopted by the CACB as its standard for granting certification.

The RAIC offers an accessible alternative through a direct, self-paced program of academic studies, design studios, and practical experience leading to the RAIC Diploma in Architecture – accepted in Canada as equivalent to a Professional University Degree in Architecture. Graduates from the Syllabus are entitled to use the designation “Dipl. Arch.” indicating that they have completed all requirements of the RAIC Syllabus Diploma.

What do you want people to know about the Syllabus Program?
What is amazing about the program is the offering of an alternative to the university path. It takes much longer than a conventional university degree (for most students, at least a decade), but it’s hard not to be excited about providing an alternative to the conventional way of doing things. Many people incur disruption in their lives that prevent the kind of 100% focus and dedication to a university architectural degree. If you can’t make yourself committed 24/7 to a university architectural degree program for 4 years (after already completing undergraduate studies), then you have no hope of making it through. But with Syllabus, it is self-paced. The deliverables are stretched out over a long period of time. So folks who have disruption their lives, still have a chance of becoming an architect.

What do you get out of teaching in the Syllabus Program?
It’s all volunteer and every activity of the design studio from coordination to grading to planning assignments and critiquing the work falls on the volunteer teachers. But it is very rewarding. I love teaching and am privileged to teach as an adjunct at the Dalhousie University Faculty of Architecture in Halifax. Syllabus adds another dimension to learning. I really enjoy working with Tom. Apart from being a very knowledgeable instructor who counts in his CV the title of Dean at the faculty of architecture, he is a constant affirmation of the profound values of humanity in architecture. He executes these values in every engagement with the students. It reminds me that architectural education does not have to be in a static box. It is fluid, dynamic, and more than just the content or the product. That is very exciting and something I get to export both to teaching at the university and in our practice at Nycum & Associates.

More importantly, the students are very inspiring. They are managing their lives and careers, yet still do the work of the program with rigour. The biggest challenge is to not give them any slack for this. We have to demand excellence in their work. The heat is on every week. Yet they still come passionate and prepared to present. It’s hard not to come away from that without a weekly feeling of inspiration and goodness. We meet on Thursdays so Wednesday nights feel like Christmas Eve.

What advice do you have for someone who might be considering the Syllabus Program?
Get started now!

Healthcare challenges in the future do not have a roadmap of experiences on which to create policies and plans, but they will be real, massive and swift: Technology-driven change is coming to healthcare that will combine with real pressures to disrupt almost every current healthcare practice. We have seen this disruption happen to other industries (for example the music industry in the 00’s presently in education and the taxi business). Much of this change has been good for consumers, but for providers it has created a new landscape. Unlike for other industries and service providers, technology-driven change has been slow and incremental for healthcare because there is so much liability and risk. But once these factors are overcome, the current paradigm will be massively disrupted. Most of the change will not be predictable or created and managed by the people in the know. It will come through the backdoor in unexpected ways. The driver of this disruption will be the superconvergence of technologies combined with diminished financial and human resources. The current planning window for any healthcare facility must recognize that plans will be implemented during this disruption so it is very important to avoid applying current assumptions. Things to think about:
• What are the factors and technologies leading to this disruption?
• How will the roles of patients and healthcare providers change?
• What will be the role of facilities when technology enables healthcare to be delivered in environments created by algorithms and networks rather than bricks and mortar?
• What is the future of the hospital?
• How do we get ahead of this so we can seize it as an opportunity rather than be subordinated to it?

Would it be safer to have Multi Gender Change rooms in our schools and how can we design these so that BULLYING is decreased and PRIVACY is improved?

Guidelines have been released to to support transgender and gender-nonconforming students. These guidelines state “All students have a right to safe washroom and change facilities.” We are launching an open-source forum on the possible design of Multi-Gender Change rooms. To read these guidelines click here.

Based on this theme we have four variations exploring how we can improve these environments. Feel free to walk through the four variations by clicking on our 3D viewer link on the right and let us know what you think. We have also released the Sketch Up model so you can create your own version. Click on the link to the right to download the Sketch Up file and don’t hesitate to send us your model at: mail@nycum.com

In recent decades, the debate over institutionalization vs. de-institutionalization has highlighted the tensions that continue to exist between architecture and psychiatric care and treatment. This is nothing new: architecture and psychiatry have shared parallel and intertwined roles in the care and treatment of persons with mental illness for the past 200 years. For example, the influential Kirkbride asylum design formalized the theory that the built environment was a key factor in the cure of mental illness in the middle of the 19th century. Psychiatric architecture reflects moral beliefs and social systems of urbanization, community, shelter, control and our quest for utopia. It is therefore not surprising that they each address social issues with solutions that are usually prescriptive but occasionally utterly inspiring.

As the professions of psychiatry and architecture face the future, changes like virtualization, technology, convergence, integration, and availability of resources will drastically alter the social needs they serve. Present day Psychiatry will increasingly be unburdened by the need for space in which to do its work, providing an opportunity to lead all types of medical practice through the transformation of healthcare, society, and the built environment.

What happens when you design a portfolio of projects using a design standard?

We examined the designs of 44 newly constructed Nursing Home facilities in Nova Scotia in order to study how they followed a newly introduced design standard. We wanted to learn how closely the facilities resembled one another, and where they differed. The projects were designed by different teams for different builder-operators, and were designed and constructed roughly simultaneously. We found it intriguing how design standards can both restrict and encourage innovation and best practices (which are always evolving). This is a summary of our findings along with some considerations for crafting a design standard.

1. Not everyone interprets design standards in the way in which they were intended, and their meaning may not be widely and consistently understood. What is a “design standard” and what does it actually mean? (Is it official? Is it a guideline? A law?)
View the standard as driven by outcomes, rather than prescribed methods of getting to those outcomes, and include explanations of intent within the standard. Be clear about the enforceability of the standard.

2. Procurement processes in a multi-project portfolio impact the interpretation of the standard. The values against which the winning designers/constructors/operators are selected (i.e. cost, sustainability, durability, quality etc.) can impact the way the standard is interpreted and either curtail or enhance opportunities for innovation
Consider how procurement mechanisms relate to the standard that will be enforced. Are the procurement values in synch with the standard’s values? Seek alignment. If the main objective of the standard is durability, do not procure for lowest cost – the result will be challenges to the standard where durability can be interpreted in multiple ways.

3. A standard that is radically different from existing practices means that the processes of the occupants will be forced to change. Culture change must occur quickly and within the premise of “what will be.” This can be challenging at the best of times, but difficulties in adapting can be amplified when the impacts of a standard are not well understood, as is often the case.
Implement a structured culture change process as part of the design standard roll-out.

4. Designing and constructing several facilities simultaneously reduces opportunities to learn from project to project. This is not a factor of standards, but of the timing of implementation of projects that follow the standard.
Implement projects in sequence and include a mechanism for studying impacts on a project-by-project basis. Include mechanisms in the standard to allow for adaptations from lessons learned.

5. Unexpected interdepartmental conflicts may emerge within government agencies responsible for various aspects of review and approval. For example, in a healthcare project in Nova Scotia, the Department of Agriculture may have concerns with food delivery, floor finishes, and tasks of the front line workers as outlined in the standard. Work-arounds during implementation to satisfy conflicts between agencies can cause cost and timeline chain reactions.
Cast a wide stakeholder engagement net in the early stages of writing the standard.

6. In a building’s lifecycle, operating costs are much greater than upfront capital construction costs. If operations costs are not contemplated in the standard, they will be sacrificed in order to meet the capital construction project requirements.
Consider life cycle performance of the building when developing standards, not just cost on opening day.

7. Standards are uniform, but projects are impacted by unpredictable variables. Geography, labour and materials, topography, site availability, risk management, and politics are factors that can put unexpected pressure on a standard.

8. Seeing is believing. When people can touch and feel what is in their future, they imagine fewer obstacles.
Run pilot projects within existing facilities.

Planning Solutions by Design: Reuniting Healthcare Programming and Design

Hospital planning and programming can take years, often involving a number of incremental and much politicized steps. Common pitfalls may include an underestimation of the architectural impacts the programming and planning have on the project. This often includes the building site and without architectural visualization of concepts, awareness of the inputs users are making to the program may occur too late causing delays and inappropriate compromise. For a new 200 bed expansion, Capital Health (Halifax) and the Nova Scotia department of Health and Wellness recognized the pitfalls of this traditional “program first, then plan, then design” sequence and decided to combine them into a single 7 month fast-tracked, combined and simultaneous Programming/Planning/Schematic Design process. The result was a highly iterative and interactive approach that forced to the front of the room all major internal and external conflicts that the project needed to address.

For information on the International Union of Architects’ Public Health Group (UIA/PHG), click here.

For complete UIA/PHG Forum information, click here.

For more about the series of awards established by Nova Scotia’s Lieutenant Governors to recognize outstanding achievements of Nova Scotians, click here.

For more about the awards, as administered by the Provincial Association, click here.

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