See all the winners of the 2019 Studio Prize.
Studio Brief | In this fifth-year undergraduate thesis studio, students conducted five weeks of intense, quantitative research to understand issues facing the health care sector in Malawi. Using the resulting data, they developed detailed design solutions to specific challenges such as an increasing demand for pediatric care in rural areas and how to respond safely and effectively to traffic accidents in congested cities.
Investigation | Chris Harnish, an associate professor of architecture at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, witnessed firsthand the challenges confronting Malawi’s impoverished, overburdened health care sector when he spent a year teaching at the Polytechnic at the University of Malawi in 2017. The country, one of the poorest in the world, expects its population to double over the next 30 years, putting pressure on a medical system already near crisis. Harnish became convinced that architecture has a role to play in response.
But in planning the studio, Harnish decided that design had to take a back seat to data—and lots of it. Students spent much of their semester looking at energy use, disease rates, and other quantitative metrics of Malawi’s health care system in order to understand specific problems, which then shaped their design solutions. “I joke that I wanted students to research for 13 weeks and design for two,” Harnish says.
The actual research took about five weeks, but it’s hard to miss Harnish’s point: It can be tempting for design professionals to jump to aesthetically compelling solutions without first investigating the cultural and economic context of the problem, an issue that compounds when that context is a low-resource country.
Harnish’s evidence-based approach helped his students to avoid imposing developed-world design typologies where they might be entirely inappropriate—for example, an air-conditioned, energy-intensive hospital like those in the United States would simply not work in a country where power supplies are unreliable and generators are often too expensive to maintain.
The jury found Harnish’s approach compelling: “The idea that one can deal with a complex system like health care, break it down into its component parts, and look at the impact of those component parts both from a data condition and architectural condition, was well done,” said juror Bryan C. Lee Jr. “That’s what you want out of students at that level.”
One student focused on the problem of pediatric care in Malawi, where the skyrocketing birthrate is straining rural resources. The resulting proposal, a model clinic, spends more time on an evidence-based plan for patient flow—how to separate sick from healthy patients, how to reduce wait times—than it does on the form of the clinic itself.
And that’s just fine with Harnish: “Deep down, I’m least interested in design artifacts,” he says. “If you have a compelling design method, the design proposal is the easy part.”
Student Work |
Crisis Response Units: Addressing Road-Traffic Injuries in Malawi | In developing countries like Malawi, rapid adoption of motor vehicles can lead to a rapid increase in related injuries. The number of patients treated rose more that 60% between 2009 and 2015, and is likely to double again by 2030. In response, Hardi Shah developed a proposal for a Crisis Response Unit—a mobile triage trailer that can get treatment to patients at the site of major road accidents. Supplies are easily accessed via wide aisles lined with shelves, double doors allow for easy loading and unloading, and deployable PVC canopies provide triage areas that receive natural light, but are shielded from the elements.
Pediatric Care Models and Infrastructure: Introducing U5 Clinics to Dense Rural Malawi Populations | Ryan Elizabeth Clark’s research centered on pediatric care in rural Malawi, where rapid population growth is leading to inefficiencies and gaps in existing preventative care resources, particularly in dense rural areas. Clark analyzed ways to control the flow of patients—both sick children seeking treatment and well children seeking preventative care. Examining the critical and preferred adjacencies of each medical department, Clark developed a proposal for a clinic prototype that combines prefabricated assemblies with customizable finishes that can be deployed strategically in rural regions to improve access to pediatric care. The research showed that customizing each clinic to its specific regional context with local fabrication and art throughout is critical for both the success of the enterprise and the acceptance of preventative pediatric care in each area.
Types and Applications: Open-Ward Design Research in Malawi’s Health Care Infrastructure | The majority of health care facilities in Malawi feature an open-ward design, in which patients occupy a shared space. In the case of infectious diseases, such configurations can have negative health outcomes on patients in the ward. Benjamin Manarski studied the deficiencies in existing conditions and proposed a series of design guidelines centered around critical issues of ventilation, daylight, and organization and safety. Manarski developed solutions for the unitized level of each patient area, sectional assemblies, and ward layouts to find ways to maximize clean air, light, and security in both new construction and retrofits.
Studio Credits
Course: The Malawi Studio: Resilient Health Care Infrastructures in Low-Resource Settings
School: Thomas Jefferson University, College of Architecture and the Built Environment
Level: B.Arch., Year 5
Duration: Fall 2018 semester
Instructor: Chris Harnish (associate professor of architecture)
Students: Ryan Elizabeth Clark, Benjamin M. Manarski, Hardi D. Shah (submitted work); Anna J. Ayik, Raymond R. Bracy, Annamarie Brecht, Sergio E. Claure, Modibo Coulibaly, Danielle M. Felicione, William M. Ferrill, Adriana Hernandez Palomino, Brandon S. Hodge, Rachel Meier, Madison N. Menard, Alexandra P. Noll, Pace K. Pace, Tyler K. Rota, Rachel B. Updegrove
