This just in from Parkland: Bank of America Charitable Foundation is contributing $1 million toward the $1.27-billion new Parkland Hospital, which held its groundbreaking, oh, about a month ago. Which is nice, but it reminds me: Yesterday the mailman delivered the Winter 2010 issue of Columns, AIA Dallas's quarterly arts-and-architecture publication, inside of which was a piece on the Parkland "megaproject" by none other than Patrick "Car-Free" Kennedy in his capacity as urban planner and partner at Space Between Design Studio.
The piece won't be online for a while, and much of it's inside baseball about how "underdogs" HDR Architects and Corgan Associates "decided to go all out in their pursuit of the project." Lots of talk about design charrettes, 3D mock-ups and models, and combining "functionality" with "healing gardens with contemplative space." Then there's this, concerning facilities and development director Walter Jones's directive for the new hospital:
For "Parkland 3.0," Jones concocted another challenge, this time for the architects newly on the job. During his due diligence for the project, he traveled to hospitals around the country where they advertised dedicated corridors in which staff and materials could move virtually invisibly from patient flow. Many were able to execute the concept at lower levels of the hospital but none were able to deliver the idea in the nursing towers.Last month we took a look at the conceptual renderings for the new Parkland. Last week Corgan put on YouTube the animated "fly-through" you see above. It's magical.
The HDR/Corgan team was inspired by an unlikely source: Disney World, where staff and performers have "on-stage" areas and "off-stage" corridors enabling them to move throughout the park without detection, which allows the magic kingdom to seem ... magical.
