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Northstar Dermatology

What: Healthcare campus (with AN.ONYMOUS)

Where: North Richland Hills, Texas

Design Team: Iman Ansari, Marta Nowak, Gesthimani Roumpani, Maya Chandler, Chun-hua Chiu, Tingji Gavin Guo, Yanrong Yan, Maxi Spina, Luiza De Souza, Wesley Evans, Lynn Hahm, Andrew Depew, Jiachen Wei, Wei Zou.

Photography: Leonid Furmansky

Publications: Parametric Architecture, ARCHITECT Magazine, The Architect's Newspaper

Awards: Architecture PR Awards (2023 Gold Winner), RTF Awards (GADA First Award 2023), Architecture and Design Collection Awards (Platinum Winner 2023)

Role: Project Manager

AN.ONYMOUS_Northstar+Medical+Campus.jpg

This Medical Campus is a 24,000 square-feet development located in North Richland Hills, Texas. The three-acre campus comprises of three single-story medical office buildings arranged around a public plaza, and landscaped grounds around the buildings.

The floor plan was developed through a series of agent-based computer simulations (using Pedestrian Dynamics and AnyLogic software) in order to synchronize the circulation with the schedule and pattern of activities, maximize efficiency and minimize unwanted obstructions or interactions. The interior finishes and flooring mark and distinguish the public (patients) spaces from the private (staff) areas, at times exposing the mismatch between the original diagram and the final layout.

The facades, considered merely as a form of orthographic representation, are black and white oblique drawings of the buildings themselves, using control joints as lines, the brick-veneer walls as surfaces, and the “shadow” EIFS areas as openings or cut-outs. The thin brick system, used with varied stacked and running bond patterns in horizontal and diagonal arrangements, conform to the drawn projections on the facades, while exposing the symbolic quality of the material as a non-brick—a tiling system that only signifies brick. In this way, the exterior facades function as two-dimensional surfaces wrapped around building shells that attempt to represent, but never fully correspond to, the logic of the interior. In doing so, the project aims to reveal the disjunction between the interior and the exterior, the structure and the skin.

Side elevation.
Interior detail.
Interior detail.
Front facade.
Main entrance.
Facade detail.
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