Designing Maternity Care for Millennial Moms

The Children's Health Fetal Center. Image © Slyworks Photography.

Millennials are the new moms. Time is flying, and in a few years all new mothers will be Millennials (or Gen Y). This generation is information-centric, so with limitless access to information many mothers-to-be obsess over every detail of impending motherhood, including finding the perfect place to give birth.

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Wellness on the Corporate Campus

Confidential energy trading facility. Photographer: Tim Griffiths

Recently I've been involved with a number of efforts to marry the traditional fitness center with a larger notion of well-being across the corporate campus and its 24/7 workplace life. In North America the idea of a corporate campus can vary: a single tall building or a cluster in an urban setting, or a suburban campus of lower rise buildings. Both have the single purpose focus of supporting collaborative teams whose “full work/life needs” are designed to be close at hand. This all-encompassing environment, a hallmark of these 21st century “company towns,” entails both wellness and fitness imperatives.

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Food & Wellness

Last month, Gensler's San Francisco office hosted its first annual Serve it Forth dinner, which brought professionals from disparate industries together to discuss the future of health and wellness at the workplace. Image © Gensler

Great food has a singular power to bring people together and create long-lasting relationships. This was proved yet again at the San Francisco office’s first Serve it Forth dinner. With the help of Guckenheimer, a premier catering company whose highly trained chefs create menus that are not only pleasing to the palate but nutritious for the body, our growing health and wellness practice area transformed the front lobby into a beautiful restaurant-like setting with a long stretch of communal tables covered in local produce. We invited 40 guests from various industries, all of whom are extremely passionate about wellness, to join us for a three course dinner and brainstorming session geared towards impacting community health and well-being.

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How Good Design Can Improve Public Health

Willowbrook MLK Wellness Community Health Park. Image © Gensler

By the year 2050, a staggering 70 percent of the planet’s population will live in urban areas. That rate of change holds significant ramifications, not the least of which is that Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause of death globally and will be proportionately represented in growing cities. NCDs pose a significant risk to these burgeoning populations. To protect the health of the global population, we must mitigate the spread of NCDs in dense urban centers by applying scalable design strategies that prioritize our emotional and physical wellness.

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The Importance of Healthful Materials in Design for People

Emblem health. Image © Chris Leonard and Gensler

Buildings are fashioned by the choices of people who design and construct them. When completed, those choices impact the inhabitants for a lifetime, but how many of us realize the true scale of this impact. Over the course of my career I have designed more than 51 million square feet of commercial space for more than a half-million people. Now consider that I am just one of more than one hundred thousand architects in the US alone. Some may suggest that as an individual, I represent a small portion of the impact to be made by architects and builders, but I prefer to think that I have a half-million people counting on me.

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