- Welcome, howdy.

- [Attendees] Howdy.

- It's great to have everybody here for the Friday Architecture for Health lecture series.

My name is Ray Pentecost, and I'm here at A&M as Director of the Center for Health Systems and Design, and it's my pleasure today to introduce our speakers and I'll make it short and sweet because they are the reason we're here.

And I'm looking forward to hearing from them as you are.

first I'll introduce Mezio Zangirolami over there.

Mezio is an architect.

Both of these gentlemen are architects with the firm EYP.

So of you will remember an earlier version of that as WHR and the H of that group, Kirk Hamilton is with us here at A&M.

They got together and are now known as EYP and Mezio is a designer with them, and his specialty is pediatrics facilities.

Claims to be a kid at heart, but deep down don't we all?

- [Attendee] Absolutely.

(speaking faintly) (Ray laughing) I love it.

And we share a passion for hats.

And so I'm looking forward to exploring that further with him later, but they're here to talk today.

And our other speaker today is Yin Jiang.

Yin came through the A&M program.

(Ray laughs) And while he was here, he got the certificate from the Center for Health Systems and Design.

I know that's really why he came.

But along the way, he also picked up his masters and doctoral degrees here in architecture at A&M, but the certificate, well done, Yin, we're proud of you.

Both are in the design track at EYP.

If you practice architecture, you know that people that have that gift are rare and precious.

So we are hearing today from two people who have that gift and who practice in that specialty of architecture.

Mezio's expertise is in pediatrics, pediatric design, and Yin's expertise is in working with large health systems, larger health projects.

And so that's enough for you to know that we're in for a treat.

Please help me welcome our speakers today.

(audience applauding) - Thank you very much, and it's great to be here today, and thank you for the opportunity to come speak with you.

He said, I'm Mezio Zangirolami and I will kick it off here and I would just kind of quickly like to introduce EYP and what we do.

Lots of stuff here to read about, but we are a top healthcare firm in both architecture and interior.

We're also one of the giants for architecture and engineering.

We do have all of that in house as well.

And we have several sectors from science and technology, higher education, as well as healthcare, obviously.

And pediatric healthcare is a subset of that.

And then we do also a lot of government work as well.

We have offices all across the country, 11 in total, from east coast to west coast.

We are headquartered out of Albany, New York and Yin and I are out of the Houston office.

So right down the road from here.

Some fun facts quickly, we have 40+ million square feet of healthcare in our portfolio, over $2 billion.

We do lean and evidence-based design principles in all our projects, and we have 85% of our work is repeat clients.

So that says something I think, and this is our 50th anniversary year.

So we are super excited about that.

- And by the way, this year we have won the AIA Houston Firm of the Year Award.

- Yes, so thank you.

- Thank you.

(audience applauding) - And we're very happy about that as well on our 50th year.

- Yeah.

- So timing is great.

So we're here to talk to you today about two projects.

I'll kick it off with the University of California Irvine Center for Advanced Care.

And then Yin will talk about Valleywise.

So we are going to talk a little bit about data-driven design, as well as a multisystem approach for sustainability, comfort, and the experience.

So first I'll start, and this project was a competition that was a design build competition that had Swinerton as well as a local architect, Cunningham Group out there in Southern California.

So I just wanna set the stage with that.

A little bit about the program, it's five stories, 170,000 gross square feet, and it is essentially an ambulatory care building.

It had primary and specialty care clinics, as well as an urgent care, an autism center, and diagnostics related to those, and some office space and even a little cafe, as well as a five-story parking garage.

I'll start with, there's a bit of a stereotype that Southern California it's always 75 and sunny and it never changes.

Well, I worked out there quite a bit and it's almost true I can tell you.

So as we think about kind of that idealic setting for doing a building, our specific site had some very interesting components.

So it was right at the border of the urban context, as well as the kind of more natural context.

So we like to call that the urban edge, the hard edges versus the soft edges on this project.

And that really became the genesis for a lot of the ways we approach design on this project.

This is just an example of the graphic or overall theme that we thought about the building in terms of the context around the site.

So this area of California has the coastal areas, it has the hills, the canyons, the wetlands.

So there's a lot of different geographies that came together in this zone.

And so we wanted to leverage that as we started thinking about the design of the building to help us be a little more creative in how we approach sustainability and so forth.

So the design we began with was what I'll call the in-the-box thinking.

So the typical clinic building has a lot of efficiencies and repetition through the exam room portion, and can become quite long geographically, as you look at the public spaces offset to one side and the staff spaces offset to the other side.

So we really wanted to take a look at how can we break out of that thinking a little bit.

And so the first thing we did was look at this shift, we called it the big move, the planning shift, and it did several things for us.

It allowed us to break up that long distance of waiting space, but it also allowed us to bring light and open space deeper into the site and into the building, and it allowed us to create some nice gateway spaces, as well as some programmatic spaces on the exterior that weren't originally there.

And so it also opened up some view corridors to some of the wetlands that were directly, I think, south of this, we had the San Joaquin marshlands and some sanctuaries.

So very nice area to look out towards.

That kind of inspired this, which is a hybrid structural system.

So mass timber is something that on the west coast has been adopted on, I think a little bit at bigger scale than other areas in the United States.

And even though it's still fairly, I'll call it new on the healthcare scene, we thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to take a look at that.

And we started off with saying, "Could this whole thing be mass timber," right?

And that would give you the best bang for your buck from a sustainability point, the carbon footprint, the embodied carbon and so forth.

But obviously thinking about hats, you have to kind of put yourself in the owner's hat as well and think about, okay, is this what's best for the day-to-day function and operation of the clinic, right?

It's an efficiency-driven model.

And so this is where the steel started to come into play.

It allowed for longer spans, a shallower structure to allow utilities to function better within that zone.

We looked at offsetting brace frames and elevators to give us aloft floor plate in order to give the maximum real estate and efficiency to that clinic.

And then the mass timber was really employed on the staff side and on the public and family and visitor side.

And so we wanted that mass timber to not just contribute to the sustainability of the project, but also to enhance the experience.

So trying to give it more than one purpose within the design.

So I'll start kind of from the top and work my way down instead of level one.

But when we looked at that diagram from the mass timber area, you can see kind of here how that comes into play into the floor plan.

And the ghosted area is what I like to call the clinical machine.

And then the other areas at the north plan, north here are the staff zones, and then the south is kind of the waiting, check-in, public zones.

So the two are separated by the clinic.

And in thinking about all the different experiences within the building, we took the approach of trying to design empathetically and give each different population of the building its persona.

So we kind of took a day in the life for example, of Dr. Janet Sawyer, right?

And what does that mean, and how do they experience the building?

So here you could see the mass timber areas and the staff lounges, and you can see that that is happening right where that planning shift took place.

And that offered different view corridors and experiential opportunities.

Along the back of the clinics where all the staff spaces are, and the staff kind of feeds into the clinics from that side, you can see the mass timber also kind of showing itself in that experience.

So all the offices, all the conference rooms back there took advantage of that materiality and the warmth that it offered.

And you can see the demarcation line here between the steel and the mass timber, essentially where the ceiling tiles begin is where the steel begins.

However, spatially, even the clinic began to benefit from that warmth of the mass timber.

On the first floor, it was a little different, it's the same essential parti but the clinic spaces were different.

We had an urgent care, we had the autism center, we had diagnostics that were feeding both, and then the staff spaces were similar, but that planning shift allowed us to create a staff garden, and that staff garden wasn't really originally programmed.

And so giving amenities back to staff, it's always nice to have those kinds of opportunities on a project, especially in the climate that we were in.

We really were trying to leverage the idea of the outdoor spaces, if you will.

Again, this is a little bit of what that feels like.

They also became a stacking beacon to the urban side, if you will, bringing presence to the building.

These are just a few images of the public side now, and you may notice as you look through these that the mass timber side is very clean and you don't see duct work, you don't see exposed conduits.

And that was very purposeful.

And when you're thinking about leveraging a system like mass timber, the last thing you wanna to do is cover it all up with duct work and conduits and start to detract from that experience that it can provide.

We brought in biophilic elements with organic light fixtures, we thought about the natural light and bringing that focus light through skylight into the building.

And even the interior palette began to respond to the idea of the wetlands and some of the geographical areas that I alluded to with themes.

The pediatrics, those are actually my kids.

So I leveraged them.

(Mezio laughs) They did sign off on waivers, but no, I'm just kidding.

So thinking about the different populations and what those populations need I think is an important part of the experience.

But again, you can see how that hybrid structural system really works in concert with the idea of bringing in a natural environment and a calming environment to the patient population.

Of course, we had to think about the pandemic.

It is something that is a global health issue.

And so thinking about that urgent care area and how you would access it one-way floors, pandemic exits.

We even looked at bringing that idea of the natural environment as an outdoor waiting space so that you didn't have to wait enclosed in a lobby, if you will.

And so you can see that here and how that begins to feel.

So right outside of the urgent care, you can sit there and wait, and enjoy the gardens.

In the spirit of improving health, we've also looked at having outdoor fire stairs, we've got the climate for it.

So why not leverage that kind of idea, right?

And encourage people to take the stairs, even as a communicating element whenever possible.

Here you can see from the inside of the urgent care space, how intuitive that connection is to the outdoors, and then the autism center with its own entry had a very similar idea where you had created an outdoor waiting space for them as well.

Autism, there's a lot of sensory issues around autism patients.

And so anything we could do to bring in a calming environment and a sense of privacy while still bringing in kind of nature was a very important.

And then just jumping back to the clinics real quick, the steel structure that I spoke about while it does help with the idea of efficiency, I think you really need to take it even a step further and look at the modularity that you can do within that steel framework.

So thinking about how do the clinics lay out something as detailed as where you put the plumbing and making sure that that's on the corridor walls, for example, gives the ability to take out intermediate walls if you wanted to adapt and change the clinic, if you wanted to create, instead of six exam rooms, four procedure rooms, or two x-ray rooms that are really large, that are serving, let's say the orthopedics clinic, right?

So thinking about flexibility and not having your module or your systems work against that, especially in California where the cost to build is so high, and then think of it on the broader scale of, how does that translate to the entire floor.

Does that allow you to do a hybrid office clinic model, or even an entire office model, hmm, that's interesting, that has open and closed cubicles.

And then I mentioned that we paid close attention to how these systems come together.

So we worked with our design assist subcontractors.

We really brought together all the kind of experts in their field, if you will.

And I think when you're doing something out of the box like this with a high hybrid system, you really need to think about that.

How does the conduit get to the mass timber area?

Where's the radiant heating?

Where are the junction boxes?

Can you offset those right into the clinical area, for example?

And that allows you to let the idea of the mass timber in this case shine through, right?

How do you keep it from getting messy up there?

- Yeah, I see some notes on there.

Feels like almost like you have multiple consultants that working together in the room, working real time and tagging things up and they try to figure things out, right?

- Exactly, and by the way, this was all done 100% virtually because of the pandemic, so all across the country, right?

So you can collaborate effectively across the waves.

And lastly, just to touch a little more on sustainability systems within this project, obviously this is a cutaway that still highlights in the red line there where the mass timber zones are, but there were a lot of other systems that affected the sustainability.

So photovoltaics, water reclamation, modular wetlands, a careful attention to a high performance facade, right?

So thinking about the window to wall ratio, where the impact of that solid wall, for example, how the sun is hitting that, where it can make the most sense, but also balancing that with the desire for views to the surrounding areas, right?

So here you can see a little bit how that begins to materialize with the facade system, going from more opaque to more open.

And also you could see the modular wetlands upfront and how that begins to take that not just support sustainability, but take that idea of the wetlands and bring it up to the building and make it part of the design.

Here you can see, again, that mass timber zone.

At the back wall, that's where the clinics are, and you can see kind of these grills at the bottom in this rendering, and that is where the displacement air came in from.

So think of a water hose slowly filling an area and the water rising.

Similar idea here with the displacement ventilation.

So the cooler air is slowly moving along the waiting spaces where you are inhabiting the space and beginning to rise, so versus a forced air system that is overhead and pushing air down like you would here in Texas, because you gotta have the breeze on you, right?

There it's a little different.

And so we're able to employ these creative systems to enhance sustainability and energy reduction within the project.

And then just to kind of close, the systems you employ and the attention to sustainability can really enhance an experience.

And so it's not on top of the experience, it's part of the experience and integrated into that.

So I will hand it over to you, hows that?

- [Yin] Right.

You can use the clip.

- [Yin] Thank you.

- All right, so Mezio and thank you for the presentation.

I think this UCI project is really a multisystem approach and it really kind of combines so many different things, a plethora of things, and how to make them work together and to make the best project that's possible.

So, for me, for the Valleywise project, let's kind of take a closer look and then kind of pinpoint on our focus onto just one single system in the project, which is external solar sunshades design.

And Valleywise Hospital is located in Phoenix, Arizona.

It's a very hot and arid climate.

And you can see from the site plan that unfortunately, this building is oriented from a north and south axis.

So this is because of all other kind of constraints in the hospital and for the circulation, for the site constraints.

So sometimes you don't really get the best orientation out of the patient towers as you would hope.

So how can we make this work and how can we mitigate some of the effects of that patient tower is become our there problem here.

And here are some renderings.

This is Arizona Burn Center.

That is a part of the Center of Excellence as part of the Vallywise Hospital.

And this is showing on the west facade, that's a separate entrance, then hospital's main entrance, and you can start see some of the external solar shade on top of the entry.

And the next view, this view is from the hospital main entry.

And you can see this long facade that's facing east and west with the patient room solar sunshade on the outside of each room.

So before I dive into details, I'd like to say something about our EYP's Green Lab.

The Green Lab consists of a group of highly specialized building performance analysts.

And they work very closely with our designers and with the clients to come up with the best solution for promoting human health to increase the building performance.

And Brandon Andow here, he's the mastermind of this project.

He's pretty much done most of the analysis that you're gonna see.

- [Mezio] And I would add that this is an integral part of how we approach projects.

So for example, he was also very instrumental on the UCI project as we start to investigate all these different sustainability systems.

The UCI project was checking off all the boxes to get to that lead platinum level.

And he was very instrumental.

And a lot of the analysis that Yin's gonna share with you, we did similar analysis on the UCI project and zoomed into those kind of micro details as you're saying.

- Yeah.

- [Mezio] So I think that becomes a really important thing to employ in your projects, especially when you have curved facades and things of that nature that can cause solar focusing or other things of that nature.

So, yeah.

- Yeah, It's a very nimble and efficient group that is always good to tap into for additional resources in terms of building performance.

So to start with, we put the entire building and the site into a kind of seasonal radiation study, and it is not surprising that in June, that's on the top right, there's a lot of bright orange and yellow.

That means you are getting a very high amount of solar radiation.

And the building itself, you can start to see some green patches.

That is our east and west facade.

And you can see that the green patches is kind of consistent throughout March and June and September.

So it's three quarters of the year we're getting varied amount of a very high radiation.

So that's where the areas that we want to tackle and to try to mitigate.

And for sunshades, we employed two systems; one is external sunshade, one is the internal sunshade.

So the internal sunshade is basically blinds and the roller shades, and the external sunshade, the benefit of it is it blocks a lot of the solar radiation before it actually hits the glass.

So we looked at seven options here, and the first one is banded shading system, and the second is fabric shading.

These two are similar.

So the first one is a perforated aluminum kind of screen in front of the patient rooms.

And the second is made of a stretched fabric with the tightly weaved pattern.

So the third is the vertical fins.

That's like a textbook solution, right?

We learn that from the east and west facade, we want the vertical fins to reduce the solar glare.

And then the fourth one is a tilted vertical fins.

So based on the geolocation of the site, we studied the angle of them.

So we tilt this things a little bit just to better respond to the sun angle.

And the fifth one is the horizontal louvers.

Those are the smaller pieces of horizontal elements that attach to the outside of the window.

And the sixth and the seventh are the electrochromic and themochromic.

Those are not relying on any external systems, it's the glass itself.

Electrochromic is the one that you can switch the opacity of the glass with a switch with electric current, and the thermochromic responds to the temperature of the glass.

When the temperature rises to, usually it's around 30 degree Celsius and the glass start to tint itself.

So before we actually go into analyze everything, we knew that number six and number seven is probably not going to make it into the project because this is a county hospital, they're built on bond money, and they're extremely conscious about budget.

And number six and number seven will likely be over the budget that they're looking into.

So we took these seven options and the next step is to do the analysis.

So this is the solar gain rate reduction, which means the lower the bar, the better they perform.

And you can see the lowest one is the second one to the last, which is the electrochromic glass.

It's not surprising that it's performing very well, but along the other more conventional systems, we identified that the first two, which is the screen in front of it, whether it's aluminum or it's fabric and perform kind of comparatively well.

And the third one is the louvre system on exterior.

And then we looked at the glare.

How much glare do these systems reduce?

And you can see that the last two, the electrochromic and the thermochromic, they are like the superstars.

They are reducing almost like 70 to 80% of the glare.

And then the system that we picked previously, not doing a bad job either, they are reducing amount of maybe 40 to 50% of the glare.

So we did some further study.

This is more like a visual study of the glare reduction.

This is a patient room facing east.

We're looking at the morning hours.

And the first one you're seeing is the baseline, which is no shade.

And then the second one is the fabric or the screen in front of it, and the third one and louvers.

So you can see that the second and the third perform comparatively and almost the same, and they did a good job in terms of reducing the amount of reds and the oranges and yellows you see comparing to the baseline.

And then this is a more like a visual study of how the shade actually perform and how do they look like based on the rendering?

So we positioned the camera at the location of a patient as if they are lying on the patient bed and looking out through the west window.

And the first one is the one without any shades.

And the second one is the fabric screen in front of it, and the third one is the vertical fin.

So as we learn from school, that vertical fin is efficient in the west to reduce the glare.

But in this case, at this point in time, it's not doing much because the sun is right outside of the windows.

And no matter how big the vertical fins are, they are not really helping anything.

So in this case, something hanging on outside of the windows at the upper level of the window really is the best option.

And then within that unshading system, the perforated shading system, there are some other variations also that we can start to take a deeper dive into it.

So this study shows that what if we start to change the hole size of the perforation, we start to change the openness factor of the perforation, how well do they perform, or do they improve, or do they get worse?

So this number shows the probability of you getting glare and anything that's in green is a good reduction.

Anything in red is not so much.

And you can see that if you have a one millimeter hole size, you can have the openness factor of 4%, which means that 4% of the entire screen is open.

And then if you want reduce the openness factor to 2%, you can grow the hole size to two millimeters.

And if the hole size goes to four millimeters, you have to reduce your openness factor down to only 1%.

So we did some more analysis on that.

This is a very comprehensive analysis of all the renderings of all kinds of different hole sizes.

And I want to focus on the two images to the right, and the one above is not so successful on screen, which is either the hole is too large and openness factory is too large, and it's 0.89 glare probability, which means that you have 89% chance to get glare.

And you can see from the rendering that the sun is blasting through the upper part of the window.

And the one on the bottom, that is the 0.31 probability.

And then you can see that screen is actually at work.

You don't really see that bright spot of sun coming through that screen anymore.

So at this point, we are kind of ready to give the recommendation to the hospital that we think that within the budget constraints with everything, I think this might be the best option to go with, but then we got thrown another curve ball at, because again, it's because of the cost.

The hospital is not looking to employ another contractor or another system to be kind of part of that project anymore, because they don't want to incur any additional cost, any additional design assist basically to do that.

So since the project has rooftop mechanical screens, we are doing some kind of louvers on the project.

So we were asked, is there a way we can work with the louvre contractor and just to use their louvre system to try to come up with something that within their system, they can produce cheaply in lieu of the one we recommend.

So we kind of went back to the drawing board and we looked at their profile.

So the one left is the one that louvre contractor provided.

And basically, it's a straight fin.

So by the way, this is just the one piece of the louvres.

The louvre will be stacked on top of each other with a gap in the middle and just like a fixed blind system.

So they provided us the straight one and because of the cost, so we came back, we took their profile and we calculated the cross section area because we don't want to increase amount of aluminum that is used.

So then we took that and we made it into a curve shape like the one you see on the right.

So there are two folds of the benefit of using the curves.

One is it increased the structural rigidity because the louvers will span from one side of the window to another, will usually be six or seven feet.

So that will reduce the deflection in the wing.

And that's the first benefit.

And second benefit, as you can see on the next analysis, that is how does it diffuse the light?

So the one to the left is the straight option that's provided by our contractors.

As you can see the light coming from the left to the right, it hits that louvre, it bounces back to the underside of the next louvre and it reaches into the room as bands of light.

Although this is not direct light, it's indirect light, but you are still getting this kind of highlighted areas within the room.

So on a contrary, with our curved option, as the light hits the curve, it bounces back differently.

And then when it hits underside of the next curve, it diffuses the light much more evenly into the room.

So it provide a much more pleasant experience for patients, especially for the upper part of that room.

- [Mezio] Now, were these still perforated louvers?

- They are not perforated anymore, unfortunately, because that is part of our VG exercise that is opted out.

So these are the solid louvers and the purpose of that is to serve how to make the most out of it in terms of getting more indirect sunlight into the room.

So we took the study a little bit further.

I'm not going to details to each of the graphics, but this one shows the annual performance of our curved louvers, and it's not surprising that they perform very well and very consistently throughout the year.

So with that, we recommended our system to the contractor, and luckily it was accepted and the system was implemented.

As you can see on the screen, this is our final construction documents that went into the project.

This is a section cut of the anchor detail.

So you're not seeing the windows, but imagine that window will be on the same line as the wall.

And you can see six pieces of louvers attached to our aluminum angle, and the aluminum angle will attach to a bigger aluminum bracket, which attaches back to the wall.

So at this point, we are very excited, I think we made it work and we were eager to find out whether the actual product will perform the same as our analysis.

And this project, by the way, is under construction.

Some of the louvers is being manufactured and they are going up to the building very soon.

- [Mezio] It would be interesting to do, once it's all finished and everything to kind of use a room and do like a post occupancy or something to understand - Absolutely.

how it's really impacting how close to that analysis it was.

- Absolutely.

- [Mezio] You know, at different times of the year.

- Yes, this is definitely, we should plan for that.

So this shows our rigorous data-driven approach to design, and we are nimble, we're flexible to optimize the limited amount of resources that's available to us to improve human health, to improve occupant comfort, and then to improve building's performance.

- And, you know, we have a lot of examples of that kind of data-driven design.

I didn't quite talk about it on the UCI project, but we also employ when we talk about the internal planning of the building.

So and analyzing traffic and flow patterns, creating heat maps to understand how to best optimize the flow within the building, for example.

As designers, we think designs maybe all about the aesthetics, but in reality, all these things are so integrated and coupled together.

And in order to have a truly successful design that impacts the experience of the patients or the families in a positive way, or the staff, right, you have to kind of do this.

You gotta go in, you gotta come out, and balance all the different components and pressures that affect a project from cost down to the individual needs of the different patient populations.

But hopefully this, it was quick, but hopefully it was informative for you and entertaining.

So thank you.

(audience applauding) - Thank you.

- [Ray] I thought it was terrific.

- Thanks.

- [Ray] Thanks for being here.

Are there questions?

And if there are, please make your way to the microphone at the side of the stage so we can hear it clearly and get it on the recording clearly.

If others of you have a question, you might make your way up to the shadows and queue up for the microphone.

- [George] Howdy.

- [Yin] Howdy.

- My name is Gergio Sachio.

I've a couple questions specifically about the first building in the west coast of California.

The first one was, how did you guys get around some of those codes, or what are the specific codes involving mass timber that allowed you to fully encloses the systems?

I know that here in Texas, there are some different codes and can't do that, smoke, it's timber, it doesn't compute well?

So how did that all work out?

- You know, there was a lot of discussion about the type construction that we were employing and how that's different.

Those mass timbers are different construction type than the steel, for example.

And so it mass timber inherently is because of its mass is inherently fire protected, okay.

So it gives you a certain rating by itself.

So from that standpoint, that was kind of working out.

I think what we really did have to kind of talk to some code experts about the marriage of the two systems though.

And so when you start thinking out of the box like this, you have to really do your due diligence on that.

And so understanding, okay, the systems that are within the steel, you have to fire protect that.

And then if you're supporting the mass timber off the steel, that becomes another point of contention.

So could we wrap those connection points behind the drywall in a rated enclosure kind of idea, right?

So the one thing we didn't show were, I took a little artistic license, but the sprinkler system, right?

So obviously that mass timber area would be sprinkled.

And we did have a plan on how to do that.

That is one of the few exposed systems that would've been there.

In fact, the only one that we were exposing.

So we did actually run those lines.

We did a complete life safety analysis on the building.

So I don't know if that quite answers your question, but we did have to get a little bit creative on how we approached the code and how we kind of compartmentalize the building from a structural standpoint and construction type standpoint.

But in the end we felt that it was meeting the intent of the code.

And again, there may be areas of the country where this is more possible than in other areas, for example.

- And then I had a second question about the layout of the floor plans, given like the separation of the two structural systems, mass timber and then to the steel frame.

So I saw in the mass timber on the floor plans, it was more of like a fluid common space, so on and so forth.

That's what it was.

- [Mezio] Yep.

- Next to the rigid structural frame was just the post-op, op rooms, x-ray rooms, everything like that.

Was there any sort of, I guess, conjecture or kind of conversation around, should we try to match some of these for ease of our nurses going from public areas into these post-op areas to be able to be able to just aid in like way finding and then aid in exploring the building for the nurses and the staff acquainting themselves with, I know I'm on level two, I know I'm on the Eastern side, I know I need to get all the way back around to my people in the public space.

So like, was there any artistic design there or is it just like a cut paste, like we've gotta get these operation rooms in?

- Okay, so you bring up quite a few things there.

So understanding how the clinics operate becomes kind of the first thing to do here and you how is the public interacting with those reception points?

So for example, we had combined reception for multiple clinics on one side and on the other side.

The vertical circulation was in the middle kind of splitting the two zones, right?

We also had kind of an information desk right there as you come off the elevators to help direct everyone.

But as far as the nurses really didn't come out to the public side.

So the nurses and the doctors, they were on that backside all on those staff areas, right?

And we purposefully created kind of open staff zones, which we termed kind of, I think, we termed 'em like staff oasis that allowed you to create this open visual connection from the staff spaces to the clinic spaces so that you're not looking down on maze of corridors, right?

So you could understand intuitively yes, I am in this clinic and if I go down the hall, I can see the next open work area.

It's not just the same identical hallway at every point, right?

So that happened within the steel structure.

And those areas could be easily turned into exam rooms in the future.

And then of course at that point you would have more of this corridor system from that backside that you would have to address from a way finding standpoint.

But we felt that that allowed flexibility in the clinic and collaboration within the clinic, 'cause one of the big things was how do you encourage collaboration with between clinics?

So a patient may be there seeing more than one doctor, right, or may have multiple issues that they have to go see different doctors.

So having that ability to create collegiality on the staff side was important.

From the public side, yes, all that area was really malleable.

It was all about the waiting and some of spaces like the pediatric spaces had interactive components to the waiting and those happened right at kind of that dividing point, right?

And in some cases there were some waiting areas that crossed that line and we felt very carefully about where those were positioned to kind of softened that transition, so they weren't necessarily at the back of the clinic, but they were at areas where you could still bring in natural light close to kind of that mass timber zone.

So I don't know if that sort of answered your question.

- Yes, thank you so much.

Yes, sir.

All right, well, thank you.

- Sure, absolutely.

- Hi, my name is Peter Grant.

I want to ask more actually about the Green Labs and on the second project.

Were there any other areas that the Green Labs helped with analyzing to work out for the design of this patient tower?

- You mean this project or in general other projects?

- In this project.

- In this project?

So Green Lab was engaged, actually, this is the one of the first projects that the Green Lab was engaged since their establishment.

So the solar sunshade is one of the first things that our Green Lab was able to engage.

And we just had a really great time working with them.

So this just shows just the one facet of their capabilities.

And since then, I think Mezio also mentioned that they have done a lot of things.

They can do the system analysis of the entire campus they can do energy master plan basically.

And then there's a lot of other things that related to building performance, occupant comfort, especially for maybe the building facade design.

Basically they can be our building facade design consultants.

They are very experienced in different glass types, different argon-filled glass, or the low-E coatings, from different manufacturers.

And they are able to give us recommendations on what kind of glass to use in a specific climate or under a specific code requirement.

So there's a lot of things they can do.

- Okay.

Do they also work on your project as well?

- Yes, yes.

So they analyzed the facade systems, some of the connections even to the mass timber zone and thinking about thermal bridging, the window to wall ratio, they did some of the heat maps for the patient floor and the public flow.

So that wasn't really energy related, it was more about how do people go from the elevators to the check-ins, to the clinic.

So they basically employed data analysis tools to really dive deep into not just the performance of the building from energy standpoint, but from an occupant standpoint too.

And they looked at a lot of the sustainability features.

So the water use, the photovoltaic, they really were involved in many aspects on that project.

But on other projects, they come in just for one specific thing.

So on one of the projects that I'm working on, we have concave facade that's glass.

And so when you have those, you really need to be careful on what is the sun doing?

How is the sun hitting that?

What can you do to diffuse-- - That's right.

- The light so that it doesn't become like a magnifying glass and focus that energy back as reflect energy onto a roof girder or something of that sort.

or just entry.

Actually, I've worked with them on a couple of projects doing that.

And of course, there's multiple solutions that are more effective or less effective, more expensive or less expensive.

- Yeah.

- Okay, thank you both.

- Thank you.

- On the design side, how do you, or where do you seek inspiration?

When in the conversation were you looking at the long rectangle and say, "What if we grab it on both ends and push and create this offset?"

And similar in your work, Yin, where does inspiration strike on the design?

- Well, its funny, sometimes it strikes from places that you weren't expecting, right?

But in this case, I think, from my personal experience designing ambulatory buildings, I knew that at a certain point these waiting spaces can become overwhelming.

But doing that just to do that isn't necessarily a good reason, put it that way.

So we were fortunate in this sense to be able to draw inspiration from the context of where we were.

And this idea of relating to the environment and being on a constrained site, we really wanted to look at what can we do to kind of bring that marsh and that environment up to the building and more integrated?

And so by doing that, it was not just helping us from experiential side on the interior, it was also helping us create these pockets of space on the side that allowed kind of that marsh and the wetlands to leak into that first level experience.

So in that case, it was really inspiration drawn from where we were, like how can we take this wonderful natural environment and integrate it more, and softened this urban edge that wanted to encroach from the north.

- How about you, Yin?

- So something similar to what Mezio just mentioned.

So when we are designing a project, we tend to look at the environmental features where the project is located at.

So for example, the Valleywise, it's locating a beautiful area in Arizona.

It has canyons, it has rivers.

So we start to think about the color of the building, and then it's start to think about the land formation or the rock formation of that building.

And then we start to think about how can we emulate that to kind of reflect the geological context.

So we start to think about some very earthy-colored metal panels and how to layer them to kind of mimic some kind of geological features that we see in the local area.

And also the external sunshade I mentioned not just functional, but from aesthetic standpoint, it adds another layer of interest onto the building facade instead of just a flat piece of gigantic ten-story tower, but then the actual layer, although it's very subtle, but it helps with the building to add more interest.

And then we also looked at, from an inside out standpoint.

So what were you experience within the building?

For example, the north has some very good views of the mountains.

So how do we leverage that view and open up the north facade of the building, where the sun is not hitting so much?

Can we open it up as much as we can?

So everybody has a good view, maybe as a waiting room.

So when we are stressed, waiting in the waiting room, or maybe waiting for a family members, you have this gorgeous view outside, and there's no obstruction in front of you.

Everything is just pure clean glass.

So there's a lot of things at play.

It's mostly to study what the project is about, to study where the project is at, and then come up with something.

It's a synthesis of different things that just come up.

At the moment, you just have this epiphany of ting, (Mezio laughs) and you know what to do.

- Exactly.

- I find it fascinating.

I find it fascinating both of you without communicating in advance, both of you pointed to the importance of the site influencing design.

- [Yin] Absolutely.

- And it's such a challenge for students today who can get on a computer system and design a building and it lives in space.

It's a black background and you can grab it like the big hand in "Star Trek" and twist it and look at it and move it all around.

But it's like this jewel in a mounting.

And until that thing hits a piece of dirt, lands, has the influence of the site on it, the design isn't connected to the site.

And both of you, first thing out of your mouth, we related to the site influences.

That's powerful, that's a great message to this audience.

Thank you for driving that home.

- Absolutely.

- The other thing that I couldn't help but notice, and I know it's not my presentation, George, but the other thing that was really strong in your work was clarity, clarity.

The design you made it almost look simple.

And I can't imagine the hours of reducing complexity to simplicity.

That's beautiful when it's done right, that was nice with work.

And I can see that time is up.

So it's time to say thank you one more time to our speaker.

- [Yin] Thank you.

(audience applauding) (enchanted upbeat music)