Playful is the Prescription for This Hospital in Istanbul

2023 Best of Year Winner for Healthcare

Originally brought on to devise the client’s corporate headquarters, Gensler’s scope ultimately encompassed the interiors for three buildings of Acibadem Healthcare Group’s Istanbul campus: the HQ, plus Acibadem Ataşehir Hospital and Children’s Pavilion. The main hospital is vast, including 298 beds, 86 polyclinics, and 10 operating rooms across 700,000 square feet. But the overall tone is calm, particularly in the lobby where soft lighting and curved lines combine with such multisensory elements as classical piano music and a lavender scent. Beyond the Turkish marble reception desk and monumental digital artwork, tulip-shape columns frame views of an outdoor garden, all yielding a serene entry setting. Outpatient clinic rooms feature consultation areas conceived to accommodate practitioner, patient, and loved one. Playful is the prescription for the pavilion, where a fiberglass hot-air balloon and patterned oak paneling depicting a family of deer delight.

EJ Lee; Ju Hyun Lee; Jim Crispino; Eric Brill; Jacob Bousso; Olman Alvarez; Sofia Kluever.

Innovative Projects by Interior Design’s 2023 Healthcare Giants

Following the pandemic, there was no question that hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare settings were bound to evolve. Case in point, the increase in smaller design projects for more specialized facilities by Interior Design‘s 2023 Healthcare Giants. The physical design of healthcare spaces is skewing toward a better experience for both employees and patients, prioritizing wellness as much as health. Whether a storybook-like children’s facility, the trauma-informed design of a community clinic, or an overhaul of spaces for collaboration in research, all of these spaces by Healthcare Giants make a doctor’s visit just a little more pleasant.

2023 Healthcare Giants Showcase the Latest in Healthcare Design

ZGF Helps Transform Children’s’ Healthcare Design for the Better

Say goodbye to basic white walls and heavy fluorescents. For new eight-story diagnostic and treatment facility, part of a 1-million-square-foot campus expansion at Seattle Children’s Hospital, ZGf upped the whimsical. A trail map in the main lobby illustrates how the hospital’s four wayfinding zones—forest, river, mountain, ocean—connect, with easy identification of the easiest path to each destination. Charming details unfold chapter by chapter, so to speak, from backlit 3D dioramas tucked into wall niches to tiny paw prints embedded in the terrazzo floor. Read more.

A Community Clinic Built With Trauma-Informed Design Elements

In 2022, the growing clinic of Family Tree relocated to a 17,000-square-foot new building in south Minneapolis by Perkins&Will. A community clinic offering sliding-scale reproductive healthcare to Twin Cities students since 1971, Family Tree is a haven for marginalized folk. Comprehensive services include STI testing and treatment, birth control, gender-affirming care, and even legal aid for queer and trans people. Utilizing a trauma-informed approach to design, careful attention was given to the structure of the space from the very start. Read more

An Innovative Laboratory Brings Multidisciplinary Scientists Together

For the design of a facility for a renowned research center that employs thousands of the nation’s top scientists and engineers for work in homeland security, biomedicine, air and missile defense, and other hush-hush but very important endeavors, CannonDesign had to think big. The team oversaw the creation of the Applied Physics Laboratory’s new Building 201. The fourth floor of the five-story structure cantilevers on an asymmetrical forest of mirror-finished stainless-steel columns. Inside, the team combined labs and workspace for the 650-person Research and Exploratory Development Department into a collaborative network of spaces. Read more.

Behind Alda Ly Architecture’s New Furniture Design Venture

The Wing chain of women’s coworking clubs may have closed last year, but the influence of its highly Instagrammable interiors—Gen Y pinks and blues, velvety jewel tones, brass and terrazzo embellishments—lives on, not least in the work of architect Alda Ly, who founded her eponymous firm in 2017 when tapped to conceive those memorable spaces. But it’s as much the seminal project’s humanistic ethos as its jaunty aesthetic that the New Zealand-born, California-raised Ly and her majority-women team continues to practice and develop, one that puts emphasis on deep listening and hands-on collaboration with clients throughout the design process.

Parsley Health, a concierge-style medical practice, was another important pre-pandemic client. “The team there loved what we’d done with the Wing and sought the same feeling, comfort, and ease for the centers,” Ly reports. “Looking for fresh ideas, Parsley came to us precisely because we had no healthcare experience. The founder said she wanted the space to heal you, which we really latched onto.” Alda Ly Architecture did intensive research on biophilic design—“A very trendy word,” Ly admits, “but for us it meant more than bringing in plants”—and began investigating all the physiological effects that an interior can have on its occupants. The results were warm and welcoming Parsley locations in New York and Los Angeles that felt more like homes than medical offices. By using natural materials, soft lighting, and thoughtful layouts, the ALA team was able to create environments that put patients at ease and help reduce anxiety.

Women’s healthcare and wellness projects have become something of a firm specialty, but enterprises as disparate as media giant Bloomberg, Korean dessert parlor Lazy Sundaes Café, and women’s personal products brand Athena Club have all been clients. Recently, ALA designed its first furniture collection and showroom—both for textiles and furnishings company HBF. We spoke to Ly and directors Tania Chau and Marissa Feddema about that and other ALA projects.

Alda Ly Architecture Delves Into Furnishings and More

Interior Design: The Bao ottoman collection for HBF is your first production furniture. How did you get the commission?

Tania Chau: We think a lot about how to give workspaces a sense of welcome and hospitality along with comfort and flexibility. HBF was interested in having those qualities in its furniture, so it was a good match to bring our philosophy to the pieces. The brief was specific, but we had many conversations and worked collaboratively with HBF to determine the form. As specifiers, we see what clients are looking for, so we brought that perspective—as well as what we think we could use in our own projects—to the development process.

ID: What about the design itself?

TC: We care about materiality and tactility. Because HBF has a long tradition of craftsmanship, we wanted to feature wood, really showcase its natural beauty and other advantages. The oak bentwood-loop handle on some of the pieces achieves that, but it also provides function and flexibility, doing double duty as a chair back, for instance. We also thought there should be detail and interest, so a contrast signature stitch is available as well as quilting for the top of the seat.

ID: HBF then asked you to design its New York showroom?

Alda Ly: Yes, the relationship was really comfortable, so it made sense to continue developing it. The space, which used to be a fashion showroom, had an open area under a huge skylight but was otherwise very closed in. We opened it up so that every point has access to the skylight, and you feel the full expansiveness of the amazing space, like an oasis in the city. Since the displays change over time, there had to be flexibility with a conversation zone in the middle featuring a lot of the lounge furniture. But some things needed a permanent home, like textiles, which have their own niche. Because it’s a challenge deciding what a fabric will look like in a given setting, we put in an overhead light fixture that allows designers to adjust the color temperature to their particular project.

ID: You’ve recently completed two New York facilities for Tia, the women’s healthcare provider, after completing Los Angeles and Phoenix spaces. What difference did the East Coast location make?

AL: It’s exciting to have projects in our own backyard—Williamsburg and SoHo, neighborhoods we live in—because we not only get to work on them from start to finish but also understand the demographic and know what it feels like to live in this city.

A Pediatric Cancer Center in Spain Brings the Outdoors In

Covering an astonishing 20,000 acres, Spain’s verdant Parc de Collserola in metropolitan Barcelona is the city’s largest green space, home not only to medieval ruins and Foster + Partners’s famed telecommunications tower but also to hundreds of species of flora and fauna. These inhabitants, with their diverse strengths and strategies for survival, have for the last decade inspired interior designer Rai Pinto and graphic designer Dani Rubio Arauna, principals of their respective eponymous studios, in a joint effort to breathe new life into Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, a medical complex on the edge of the city’s “green lung.”

For the hospital’s Pediatric Cancer Center Barcelona, housed in a new building by architecture firm Pinearq, the collaborating designers sought to continue their ongoing tribute to what Pinto calls “extraordinary nature” throughout the 71,000-square-foot, three-floor facility. They had already introduced “an enormous number of animals in the hospital” in previous projects, Rubio notes. An octopus, which typically has three hearts, is a kind of mascot in the cardiology unit. And more than 100 other 2-D and 3-D creatures, including lacquered-plywood tigers and adhesive-vinyl jellyfish, watch over the ER department in an installation that won a 2014 Interior Design Best of Year Award in the healthcare category.

This Pediatric Cancer Center Design Features a Virtual Forest

The cancer center needed to be accessible to kids navigating major health challenges, “but it didn’t have to be childish,” Pinto continues. “The facility is used by families and professionals, so what we do in terms of design has to be comfortable for everyone.” The result is a worldly series of lobbies, living and play spaces, and circulation routes—21,000 square feet in all—that charm without condescension. In the main lobby, custom multimodule seating references invertebrate animals, as if to remind users of their own flexibility. Nearby, kids can play in a virtual forest as lively as the one beyond the hospital windows: Comprising five double-sided interactive digital screens, the installation allows youngsters to add flora and fauna, change the weather, and even move the sun and stars.

Fostering a Sense of Community Through a Caring Environment

Vibrant Hues Color This Pediatric Cancer Center Design

domestic data streamers: interactive installation (lobby)

mermelada estudio: custom furniture

ZGF Designs a New Center for Mental Health at University of California, San Francisco

2022 Best of Year Winner for Healthcare

For centuries, architecture has reinforced the stigma of mental illness. Dreary treatment facilities with sterile interiors and small windows can look more like prisons than hospitals. This bright, 173,000-square-foot research and treatment center—home to UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences—by ZGF turns the institutional typology on its head. With large windows and white-oak floors, the biophilic design reflects the fact that access to daylight and nature shortens hospital stays and improves patient outcomes. The building also aims to promote transparency and normalize mental healthcare, encouraging more people to seek help. “The space is meant to signal to patients that they are safe, they are welcome, and that they matter,” associate principal Mirjana Munetic says.

Visitors enter into a five-story atrium that draws the eye up to the skylight, where painted metal baffles filter daylight to the ground floor. The walkways around the atrium have 6-foot-high glass guardrails that enhance the sense of openness while also providing protection for patients. Waiting rooms, traditionally hidden, are adjacent to the atrium, sending a message that behavioral health patients should be visible. With a rooftop garden and an extensive art program—including landscape photographs by Richard Misrach—the resulting environment is calm, with a sense of hope.

Healthcare Giants 2022

We gather here today to look back at the stabilizing effects 2021 had on the Interior Design Healthcare Giants. But in doing so we find we just can’t quit 2020. In our tracking of business trend data for the group of top 40 firms doing significant work in the healthcare arena since 2019, we have seen huge fluctuations driven by the pandemic. But within those ups and downs, we are just now beginning to see what normal business for the sector might look like. 

Vitale Design Directors Envision a Playful Dental Clinic in Castellón de la Plana, Spain

There’s nothing fun about cavities, especially for kids. Keeping that in mind, design directors Lucía Chover, Carlos Folch, and Santiago Martín—who founded Vitale in eastern Spain’s Castellón de la Plana in 2006 after meeting at its Universitat Jaume I—envisioned a playful clinic that would actively destress anxious children and parents for Isabel Cadroy, Dentista Infantil, a local pediatric dental office.

Cheery neo-Memphis colors, simple geometries, and a dash of biophilia suffuse the two-level, 3,760-square-foot space. It’s a stark contrast to Dr. Cadroy’s previous office, which had “no person­ality and was on an awkward mezzanine level,” Chover explains. To inject creativity into the new city center location, the Vitale team employed wood and tile to draw on tropes of learning, since teaching children about oral health is the fundamental principle of Dr. Cadroy’s work. At the entry, a plywood arch slots together like a construction game. Farther in, doors and paneling are routed with a puzzle design. Walls, columns, and restrooms clad in uniform white square tiles take inspiration from the gridded notebooks children use to learn to write. Birch-plywood chandeliers incorporating minimalist shapes nod to mobiles over a crib yet don’t descend into infantilism. “We focused on the sensations of comfort, warmth, familiarity, and well-being,” Folch notes.

Throughout, rounded shapes and indirect lighting soothe. Additional fear-reducing measures include the waiting area’s capsule-shape seating nooks, which cocoon and foster a sense of protection. In the main corridor, a series of pitched roof structures provide a homey feeling. One serves as a transition between the waiting area, restrooms, and radiology and post-treatment rooms. Beyond, the second roof structure, or “tunnel,” as Martín refers to it, funnels little patients to the pair of skylit treatment rooms, which both look out to a mood-boosting vertical garden. In fact, green is one of the three main colors in the project’s palette. Pantone 7723 C, a calming fern, Pantone 1635 EC, a warm terra-cotta, and Pantone 121 C, an optimistic yellow, appear in everything—from the tile grout, vinyl flooring, and logo typography to the waiting-area and treatment-room seating.

sancal: seating (reception, treatment room, post-treatment)

scarabeo ceramiche: sink (restroom)

Roca: sink fittings

ineslam: sconces

natucer: tile

Tarkett: flooring

font arquitectura: architect of record

madentia: woodwork

at4 grupo: general contractor

RIOS Turns to Healing Elements for the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine in Los Angeles

If ever there were a multilayered hybrid collaboration, it is the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine. A long, narrow new-build oriented on a north-south axis not far from the University of Southern California’s campus, it encompasses 84,000 square feet across five floors, and includes 3,500 square feet of coveted outdoor space. HLW completed the structure’s core and shell architecture. RIOS, under the leadership of creative director and partner Sebastian Salvadó, handled the remainder of the project, which took three years to complete, just as COVID-19 hit the scene.

Primarily a cancer research initiative, the institute is led by founding director and CEO David Agus, a physician and researcher, and was spearheaded by Oracle Corporation cofounder and noted billionaire Larry Ellison’s $200 million donation. A place for both labs and clinical services, it is a healthcare facility, but it’s also a workplace requiring offices, conference rooms, lounges, and staff amenities. Adding to the hybrid designation is the project’s educational component, which consists of a gallery celebrating medicine’s history and advances and an event space for symposia, and a repertoire of blue-chip artwork, much of it coming from Ellison’s private collection.

“The program is broken into three types of spaces,” Salvadó begins. Solitary rooms are for focused work. Lounges encouraging collaboration are dubbed transitionary spaces. They adjoin public zones, which include conference rooms and a kitchen. Arriving at the concept was not only Salvadó and the RIOS team but also the doctor and the donor. “Sebastian was amazing in figuring out a way to include me in every decision,” Agus enthuses. “He made models so I could understand.” And Larry, who Agus first met while treating his nephew, was “involved in every decision, too.” To which Salvadó adds, “Our goal was to take Agus’s vision and translate it into a built space.” It’s a holistic vision, including wellness programs and nutrition counseling, that acknowledges nature as a healer, while also integrating AI, physics, biology, math, and engineering.

Labs hold the key to the project’s organization. They are visually open to everyone on all floors and on all sides of the building. It was an expensive move but worth every penny: It not only anchors internal neighborhoods but also guarantees interdependency and that user paths intersect. Circulation is anything but orthogonal and the scheme is quite a departure from standard silo situations. The predominant use of wood—in the white-oak exposed ceiling and beams, thermally modified ash-slat partitions, and brushed oak flooring—is unusual, too. The setting is warm and “reminiscent of old warehouses,” Salvadó notes, and also underscores the project’s nature-centered theme.

Set atop a two-story parking garage, the institute centers on a three-story atrium. A pair of stairways lined with live plants (as well as elevators) lead up to reception on the atrium’s second floor, where the gallery is also located. From there, a path proceeds to a lab fronted by a large glass expanse so that even visitors can see in. Nearby is the donor wall, its brass plaques arranged in the form of an olive branch, the ancient symbol of healing. Toward the back of this floor is Agus’s office, a bright aerie complete with a Charles and Ray Eames lounge chair upholstered in indigo corduroy, a slatted wood ceiling, and access to a landscaped terrace. It’s here that, among other work, Agus meets with donors, broadcasts lectures, and writes; his fourth book is a deep dive into nature, which he believes holds all the answers.

That’s in step with the large, Pacific Ocean–facing terrace off the building’s skylit top floor, half of which is devoted to office areas and staff amenities, including a combined gym and yoga studio and a librarylike lounge with shelves of books holding the entire sequencing of the human genome. The other half of the floor is dedicated to patient care. Although more clinical and white than the institute’s other areas, forms, such as the check-in desk, are rounded, and vertical surfaces are wrapped in grass cloth-esque wallcovering. A bridge spanning the atrium connects the two sides and adjoins the project’s experiential aspect: a grass and rock garden built on top of one of the labs. “It’s not Japanese but more West L.A,” Salvadó says. “The gravel looks like beach sand and the greenery is bright like what’s found in the Santa Monica Mountain canyons.”

Hope and love, also crucial to healing, are literally spelled out in Robert Indiana’s immense sculptures, both located in the atrium lobby. They’re joined by pieces elsewhere in the hospital by such bold-face names as Jim Dine, Keith Haring, and Ai Weiwei.

Le Corbusier famously said, “A house is a machine for living in.” Agus proffers his version. “RIOS made a building that enables us to work. The building is not separate from the work, it’s part of it.” He hopes it encourages the next generation to enter science and medicine to discover a cure.

Art Therapy

At L.A.’s Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, concerns for health and wellness extend beyond research, labs, and treatment clinics. Art plays a part in healing, too—at least it does to the institute’s founder and CEO David Agus and establishing donor Larry Ellison, also known as the cofounder of Oracle. Together they conceived of a plan in which art would pervade—and elevate—the premises. Among the artists featured are Bunny Burson, Jim Dine, Donald Sultan, and Ai Weiwei.

“I had the privilege to work with Steve Jobs,” Agus says. “He implanted in my brain that every detail matters.” Jobs’s fellow tech titan Ellison donated many of the center’s pieces from his collection. So far, they number 35 and encompass a range of mediums, including a granite bust by Jaume Plensa. Some even allude to cancer, the institute’s primary research initiative. One is Jeff Koons’s 12-foot-tall magenta sculpture of an elephant; the animal has genetic mutations precluding it from developing the disease. Another is Jacob van der Bruegel’s mixed medium covering a wall on the building’s top floor. Its components resemble cancerous cells as seen under a microscope while searching for better treatment.

RIOS: clarissa lee; devin miyasaki; erin williams; haoran liu; laura kos; melanie freeland; misato hamazaki; nicole robinson; tom myers

Oculus Lighting: Lighting Consultant

Harold Jones Landscape: Landscaping Consultant

Risha Engineering: Structural Engineer

CRB Engineering: mep

Systems Source: furniture dealer

Andrea Feldman Falcione: art consultant

KBDA: gallery consultant

Sierra Pacific Constructors: general contractor

Tom Dixon: tables (lounge)

Bla Station: sofas

tech lighting: pendant fixtures

muuto: chairs (lounge), rug (library)

Design Within Reach: chairs (library)

Indo: table

Luminii: linear fixtures (gym)

Regupol: flooring

Kvadrat Maharam: curtain fabric

Louis Poulsen: pendant fixtures (lounge)

tacchini: white sofa, ottoman

bernhardt design: lounge chair

Hay: side chair

Pierre Augustin Rose: coffee table

Green Furn­iture Company: benches

MDC: wallcovering (hall, clinic reception)

Miller Knoll: chairs, ottoman (office)

Systems Source: custom desk

armstrong: ceiling

XAL: recessed ceiling fixture

bentley: carpet

Amerlux; Lucifer: lighting

Ariana Rugs: custom carpet

Thermory: wall slats, ash flooring

Galleher: custom oak floor planks

Benjamin Moore & Co.; Dunn-Edwards; Farrow & Ball; Sherwin-Williams Company: Paint

Fun Connection Design Turns to Sunny Hues for a Children’s Hospital in China

2021 Best of Year winner for Clinic

For any children’s hospital, employing cheery color is nearly obligatory. For this renovation of the project type, located approximately a three-hour flight west of Shanghai, founder and design director of Fun Connection Design Yaotian Zhang chose a sophisticated, residential-esque palette of pale blues and sunrise oranges for furnishings and built-ins but also for the chips in the terrazzo flooring that runs throughout the 2,152-square-foot facility. There are also abundant clean white surfaces, homey rounded archways, and surprise peek-a-boo tunnels and cutouts for kids to explore. “The goal is to provide a visually warm environment that makes patients and visitors feel comfortable,” Zhang says. Of course, maintaining and promoting health is paramount, too. Ample biophilia populates the hospital, whether it’s the live plants at the entrance with which people entering interact or on the terrace. Further, the firm installed smart air-conditioning and thermal glass and lighting systems.

Fun Connection Design: Yaotian Zhang; Yanzhou Chen; Anna Tao; Dawei Xu; Yinwen Huang; Haiyan Xiang; Miao Zhang; Congyi Luo; Wei Mao; Chao Liu; Xiaowei Hu

Jacky.W Design Crafts a Calming Dental Clinic in Wenzhou, China

A dental clinic must accomplish two crucial goals: It has to be safe, meeting complex medical requirements, while also feeling safe for clients nervous about delicate procedures. Jacky Wang, chief designer of Jacky.W Design—a 2018 Best of Year Award winner—balances both objectives elegantly with the 2000-square-foot Ruixiang Dental Clinic in China’s Wenzhou City. 

Some things couldn’t be changed, including a quartet of load-bearing walls within which Wang sited rooms like bathrooms that didn’t need natural light. For the rest, beveled whitewashed corners and walls clad in warm Boxwood created the necessary—and necessarily separate—circulation routes for doctors, patients, and discarded medical supplies. And also a sense of ease, buttressed by cheerful signage of glowing green boxes and natural greenery. The design, Wang says, “gives a sense of a cozy house decorated with plants and woods in the spring sunshine.” Not a bad feeling for a busy doctor’s office.