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Such a comprehensive consultative process enabled Kasian's healthcare studio to create a a user-focused hospital embraced by community, hospital workers, and patients alike, at the ACH.

Dubbed "the lego building" by a 9-year-old community member, "because that's where they put children together again," the hospital was designed not as a sophisticated adult building that children occupy, but as a lively, colorful place children could make their own.

"What makes a child comfortable in a building?" muses Milton Gardner, a principal and head of the global healthcare studio at Kasian, and partner in charge of programming and planning for the Alberta Children's Hospital. "It's kind of a mystical question." But when he sees children running through the hospitals' wide spaces, grabbing each other as they go, or talking excitedly about the fish in the aquarium, he knows they are comfortable here. "It's a pleasure to stand back and see the kids own it."

The Institute for Family-Centered Care was a key consultant, helping families to articulate their priorities and integrate them into the design. "The biggest challenge is to draw people out of their day-to-day paradigm, project them ten or fifteen years into the future, and say, what's your ideal world going to be like?" says Gardner.

Design workshops with groups of patients, family, and staff involved free-flowing discussions and creative explorations, asking participants to describe their ideal hospital. Input from the workshops provided the key themes that shaped the hospital design: a sense of place; a sense of arrival; warm and welcoming; daylight; fun and interesting; functional and efficient; harmony with nature; a personal, non-institutional scale.

"It's the answers you don't expect that educate you the most," Gardner adds. When the children were asked how they felt about hospitals, for example, the design team expected associations of pain and fear. Instead the children described hospitals as boring, dull, and dark. "The children changed our viewpoint," says Gardner.

In one exercise, participants used paper and coloring pens to draw their vision of a perfect hospital. Children's input was surprisingly consistent across the ages: colorful, with imaginative building forms and windows, plant materials, pets. "The windows were drawn in scale to the people," says Gardner. "That's when we twigged that we could use windows to reduce the scale of the building."   >>>

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SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE Adjacent windows are visually grouped to change the perceived scale of the building. Photo: Robert Lemermeyer Facade detail. Photo: Robert Lemermeyer The central gathering space includes a fountain onto which a stage can be lowered. Photo: Robert Lemermeyer Central space with the stage lowered. Photo: Robert Lemermeyer Above the gathering space, lighting fixtures take the shape of a crescent moon and stars. Photo: Robert Lemermeyer Ground floor plan. Image: Kasian Architecture Interior Design and Planning Third floor plan. Image: Kasian Architecture Interior Design and Planning Detailed section at the common gathering space. Image: Kasian Architecture Interior Design and Planning   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.