When approaching the master planning for a new health-focused campus as part of Peninsula Health Care District in San Mateo County, Calif., the team behind it looked to European models that integrate healthcare into the social fabric of an area to support the wellness and community engagement of its seniors.
The process was shared by Demetrios Kanakis, associate vice president and project designer at HGA Architects and Engineers during the EFA Conference in Anaheim. Kanakis detailed the initiative to create a range of housing options (independent living, assisted living, and skilled nursing) in an environment that provides a number of other services to residents in a multigenerational district.
"I realized what we're trying to do is capture a continuum of care," he said. "It's where everyone is, hopefully, going."
Master planning began with understanding the community context, including the site itself and what surrounded it in the Bay Area neighborhood.
Next, the team assessed expansion opportunities based on what was already there and what else is needed. Planners turned to stakeholders to find what's important to support care as well as the community to create appropriate programming. For example, their research yielded 40 different land uses that would help meet the goals expressed and then figured out how those might be applied to the site based on noise, traffic, height limitations, etc.
After varying assessments, components emerged such as therapy gardens or a gym/wellness center in addition to the senior living components that would need to be built to support the population. "San Mateo County is not unique. It's just like the rest of the country. The population is aging," Kanakis said,
And while housing for seniors was a critical piece of the overall plan alongside easy access to services to engage them in the community, so too was having a multigenerational population in which to engage. This was achieved by looking to existing pieces like schools to building an office space to attract young professionals to creating parks and green spaces where all might interact.
But from a bigger picture, Kanakis said that when the master planning team turned to European models for inspiration, what it often found were plentiful ties to the community at large, socially and culturally. "What we saw over and over again is a breaking down of borders," he said.
With complements like housing, retail, hospitality, and healthcare services, the full vision begins to emerge, with a focus on senior-friendly amenities like adult day care or a research library. Another idea gleaned from overseas research is the "assessment center," or essentially an on-campus triage where local senior residents can go to have the expertise available to direct them to the precise treatment or care they need.
Other commonalities found in research included concepts like the decentralization of outpatient services from acute care hospitals into smaller buildings to create a village-like campus with built-in flexibility in terms of sites and clinical programming. It also breaks down an overall program into pockets of opportunity for engagement and movement. "The one thing you want to do is promote and push people to meander," he said.
Translating this with appropriate scale and proportion is key, too, to bringing a campus to a level of comfort for those living within the district and around to feel at ease walking in to use services or enjoy the green spaces—"humanizing the architecture," Kanakis said.
