Ideas

  Accessibility, strategic boom placement, creating defined anesthesia and equipment zones. Healthcare today demands more of our clinical spaces to optimize treatment, healing, and time management; the operating room is no exception. Ryan Gorscak, Associate, Project Manager, LEED AP explains innovations in OR design as part of today’s evolving healthcare model.

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  The design process, at its core, has always been one of communication. Through the design process, architects can transform the aspirations, needs, and desires of our clients into a meaningful physical reality. In that respect, we are translators: we take the idea and translate it into a built form. For generations, the language of…

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Websites like Bustler and ArchDaily give designers a platform for testing out their wildest ideas without the constraints of time and budget. It is widely accepted that we are made better by taking the time to explore big ideas in order to inform the real-world work we do for clients. We believe that this practice should…

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Reposted from the SHIM website:   Leadership is a skillset and gifting that has been applied to different persons throughout the course of human history. We each encounter various leaders in the different aspects of our lives. We can each name the leaders in our communities, our churches, our workplaces, and even our homes. Each…

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The design process is a problem-solving exercise, and it begins by understanding a great many issues. These issues, of course, include what is first presented by the client, but many are hidden beneath the surface. Our clients come to us because they need a new building, an existing building renovated, or a combination of the…

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The story is always at the heart of a good book. The same is veritable of successful architecture – whether you call it a parti, a thesis, or a question, a building has a guiding concept. Even while architecture and graphic novels are often viewed as discrete pursuits, comics share numerous parallels that serve to…

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Rendering vs. Reality

If you follow the A/E/C industry, you may have noticed that the term “rendering” is thrown around casually these days. It can be hard to distinguish the inspiration for a project from the plans for the real thing. It’s no secret that the design process varies heavily from client to client, project to project, but…

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Remember elementary school, when you were asked to draw something for class? You got out your crayon box and let your imagination take over.  You drew grass and flowers and a sun, or a house with a front door and four windows. You mentally put yourself into that piece of paper and went to town. …

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“What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.” -Margaret Mead   When I joined an architecture firm for the first time a year ago, I was drawn to being part of something bigger than myself (literally) that I could not only appreciate, but see and experience in…

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I’ve known since I was 12 years old that I would use my design talents to impact underrepresented communities, and I never expected that journey would bring me to Pittsburgh.      In 2011, I was invited to Pittsburgh from Florida by the UDREAM Program at Carnegie Mellon University. UDREAM, the Urban Design Regional Employment…

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