It allows me to live where I want to live.

Future Patient

An important factor in the quality of life and health for all Nova Scotians.

Links

• Kings County News article, August 13, 2018
• CBC Article announcing project, January 13, 2017
• Blog post announcing project

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

People ranging from early stage start-ups and established entrepreneurs, to government, academic and corporate leaders, to member organizations that propel the LGBT business sector forward gathered at the summit. All attendees were invested in advancing the LGBT community at large,supporting the LGBT entrepreneurs, and creating sustainable social change. The influence and economic impact of the North American LGBT market is undoubtedly vastly growing. There are currently more than 1.5 million LGBT-owned businesses in the US and Canada, contributing nearly $2.2 trillion to the economy, producing more than 35,000 jobs.

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

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?

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.

For more about Brigadoon:
Brigadoon Website
Brigadoon on Facebook
Brigadoon on Twitter

Pilot projects are a great way to invite experimental change without having to commit entirely to the change until it has been properly evaluated. Change is happening at a staggering rate in Mental Health. Changing the way teams work together to adapt to these changes and improve patient centred care is the main goal of these experimental projects.

For more about the Quality Summit and the other award-winning projects, click here.