Cassandra Beaudry

By necessity and definition, public health care facilities bring communities together. Architecture should take advantage of this essential fact by offering diverse qualities of care in all spaces at the human scale. By spatializing existing living systems, the large institutional building model begins to articulate itself. The waiting rooms become the support system to the medical rooms, and vice versa. This exchange is configured to establish mutualism: a process where two environments interact in such a way as to benefit one another as organisms. Mutualism is the transactional bond and prerequisite to the articulation of space in this building. How can waiting spaces provide care for a range of urgencies with varying waiting time? With three access points, the large institutional building deconstructs and unravels to site-specific conditions. Public access is necessary to establish long-term health and economic sustainability in the community. Therefore, urgent care, dental care, and a community gym are accessible and safe to the community. Mutualism was integral in conceptualizing this building. By deconstructing elements of the greater institution, interrelationships between the existing microenvironments were revealed. My objective was to create a building where the interior architectures exchange with the exterior landscape, thus representing a completely integrated system.