Practice area
Healthcare architecture
A healthcare building is used at every hour, by patients, families, clinicians and the people who keep it running. Good design has to hold for all of them.
Our approach to healthcare design
Healthcare buildings run around the clock and are among the most demanding places to get comfort, air quality and energy right. We bring the same comprehensive approach we bring to every project, weighing efficient use of resources, thermal comfort, indoor air quality, biophilia and wellbeing, and we measure each decision against the people in the building: patients and families, clinicians and staff, and the way each of them arrives, finds the way, sees daylight and hears the place. Energy, carbon and water, safe materials and a plan for change complete the list.
By bringing passive-building technology together with the principles of biophilia, we aim for design that supports health and performance, lowers stress and helps people relax and regenerate. Research suggests that natural light, plants and views of nature can help reduce stress, improve mood and reduce fatigue, for patients and for the people who care for them.
Biophilia is “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.”Edward O. Wilson (1986)
Healthcare projects
Healthcare work from earlier in R. Spencer Steenblik’s career, delivered inside other practices, from a children’s hospital to small medical offices. We list the firm and the contribution plainly.
Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford
Stanford Hospital had outgrown its facility and needed significant expansion. The drawings here, a rendering, a front elevation and the site model from KPF’s 2008 design, show how that expansion was first imagined to meet the street and the existing hospital.
Contribution: R. Spencer Steenblik, intern at KPF, elevations and renderings.
View project
Athletes’ Performance Arizona
A physical therapy and training facility for Arizona State University athletes.
Contribution: R. Spencer Steenblik, design team member; documentation and coordination of drawing sets and renderings.
NAU Health and Learning Center
Recreation, student health, counseling, classrooms and athletics under one roof, including a medical clinic with pharmacy, lab and x-ray. LEED Gold, with a solar thermal array supplying about 70 percent of domestic hot water.
Contribution: R. Spencer Steenblik, team member, executive drawings.
View project
Wasatch Orthodontics
A new two-story medical building with a six-chair orthodontic office and a flexible second level for future build-out. The double-height glass entry lobby marks the building on Main Street.
Contribution: R. Spencer Steenblik worked on this project at Rather Architecture.
Planet Tooth Pediatric Dentistry
A new seven-chair pediatric dental office designed to appeal to children and kept within budget, with the hygiene area placed for views to the mountains and room to add operatories. Shown during construction.
Contribution: R. Spencer Steenblik worked on this project at Rather Architecture.
Warmth, light and a human scale
A care building is judged first by how it feels when you walk in. We lean on timber, daylight and a scale that suits the person arriving, whether that person is a child, a parent at the end of a long week or a nurse starting a shift.
The interior beside this text is from a school, not a clinic, but the lesson carries over. Wood you can see and touch, and light that moves through the day, make a room calmer than any sign telling you to relax.
Design intelligence for care environments
A healthcare project starts from a regulatory frame and ends in a building that people live in for years. The frame is the floor, and the technical ideas that follow are how we try to get above it.
The best-known result in the field is still a simple one. In a 1984 study in Science, Roger Ulrich found that surgical patients with a view of trees recovered with shorter hospital stays and needed fewer strong pain medications than patients facing a brick wall. We treat views, daylight and nature as clinical-environment decisions and put them in the program early, with the same standing as adjacencies and square footage.
The same habit shapes the plan. Walking distance, sight lines to patients, supply close to where it is used and rooms that can change acuity without moving the patient are workflow decisions, and we test them with the clinical team on the plan itself, using simple diagrams and, where it helps, computational layout studies, before the building form is fixed.
Air and surfaces come next. Ventilation rates, pressure relationships and filtration are set by standards such as ANSI/ASHRAE/ASHE Standard 170, so the design job is to make the building easy to keep clean: seamless finishes, few ledges that collect dust, hand-wash sinks where hands are actually washed, and an infection control risk assessment before construction starts.
We specify low-emitting finishes from manufacturers who disclose what is in their products, for example through Health Product Declarations, and we record what we chose and why.
Light, sound and nature complete the picture. Daylight into patient rooms and staff areas, glare control and electric light that changes through the day are our starting point; the evidence for circadian lighting is still developing, so we state it as a hypothesis and never as a promise.
Speech privacy is a patient-privacy issue as well as a comfort issue, so wall and door sound ratings and absorptive ceilings are planned with the layout. We use 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design (Terrapin Bright Green, 2014) as a checklist, and we plan for energy, backup power and growth from the start, as the second level of Wasatch Orthodontics was planned for future build-out.
How a healthcare project runs
A healthcare project with us moves in five stages. We begin with the program and an evidence review: who uses the building at which hour, which standards apply, and what the research says about the decisions that matter most for this project type. Layout options are then tested with the clinical team against workflow, daylight and sight lines, and the reasons for the chosen option are written down.
Next comes the envelope, air and light, developed as one package so that one decision does not undo another. Documents and specifications follow, with finishes and equipment chosen for cleaning and maintenance and clear infection-control instructions for the contractor. At handover we ask the people who use the building what works, and feed it into the next project.
Where our research meets health
phi architecture φ is a design-research practice. Our work on timber and metal joints, including the patent-pending [Xyl]ode joint, is aimed at adaptable, non-orthogonal structure, which matters in buildings that expect to change. We bring the same habit of testing ideas against evidence to healthcare work.
A name for a principle, not a person
phi architecture φ is named for a principle, not a person. Φ is the proportion in which a whole and its parts hold in harmony, the same relationship repeating from the smallest part to the largest. A health project is exactly that kind of whole: many parts, one proportion.
Standards and sources referred to
Ulrich, R. S. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science, 224(4647), 420 to 421. | ANSI/ASHRAE/ASHE Standard 170, Ventilation of Health Care Facilities. | Facility Guidelines Institute, Guidelines for Design and Construction of Hospitals and of Outpatient Facilities. | Terrapin Bright Green (2014), 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design. | Edward O. Wilson (1986), Biophilia. These are general references; every project is designed to the codes and guidelines that apply to it and its jurisdiction.
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