Dell Medical School Health Learning Building
Photo © Dror Baldinger, AIA - Architectural Photography
The University of Texas Dell Medical School is the first new academic medical center facility built from the ground up at a tier-one public university in almost 50 years. The newly opened Health Learning Building features flexible team-based learning studios with glass enclosures, an all-digital library, and state-of-the-art medical simulation labs.
Social Edge
Photo © Dror Baldinger, AIA - Architectural Photography
The building features a “social edge” which consists of interaction and circulation spaces connected by a glass enclosed 118-step staircase lined with more than 2,000 panes of glass.
The University of Texas at Austin used a discovery-driven planning process to design the Dell Medical School, the first new academic medical center built from the ground up at a tier-one public university in almost 50 years. The project required developing an accredited curriculum and designing the initial building without any pre-existing faculty, students, or dean. Designed to connect the campus medical district to the rest of the university and downtown Austin, the new 75,000-sf Health Learning Building features flexible team-based learning studios with natural light, an all-digital library with no books, state-of-the-art medical simulation labs, and abundant indoor and outdoor social spaces that make it a dynamic community hub.
“There were so many unknowns, we decided to use a discovery-driven planning process to help us address them in a way that was rational,” says Mary Jo Olenick, a medical education programmer with The S/L/A/M Collaborative. “The discovery-driven planning process was developed by Harvard Business School in 1995 when all of the dot-coms started coming online, and there were a lot of new initiatives people couldn’t figure out how to make business plans for. The process essentially requires that you start at the desired outcome and reverse engineer what it will take to get there.”
Despite starting the planning process with no dean, students, or curriculum, the project’s construction budget, location, and footprint were clearly defined. The university also assembled a diverse interdisciplinary project team led by deans from other schools on campus.
“One of the wonderful things about UT Austin is they already had a top-ranked school of nursing and a top-ranked school of pharmacy that had been in place for many years,” says Olenick.
The deans of these schools served as proxies for senior leadership in the early planning and design stages, establishing a truly inter-professional approach from the very beginning with more than 250 participating contributors, including UT faculty, physicians, medical education experts, and students.
“We played a game we called ‘SLAMopoly’ where each of the deans bought different types of spaces, so we could create a dialogue about what things they really valued,” says Bob Pulito, president of The S/L/A/M Collaborative. “The main themes that came out of that exercise were technology, community and citizenship, excellence in education, an environment of wellness, and a personalizing of medical education.”
“We found the other deans were more than willing to participate,” says Sue Cox, M.D., executive vice dean at Dell Medical School. “They’re invested in the medical school because they’re invested in inter-professional education. It’s something we’ve woven into all of our curriculums.”
Straw Program Benchmarks
Using the known values of budget, space, and location, the team developed a “straw program,” which was a conceptual model for allocating the available budget across 45,000 sf of programmable space, so it could be benchmarked against similar programs at other universities.
“We looked at benchmarks for how space is being utilized in medical education buildings across the country, at both new schools and top-tier schools, since that was really important to UT Austin,” says Olenick. “Then we took our programmable space and distributed it in our straw program based on some of those benchmarks.”
Once the Dell Medical School metrics were adjusted to reflect its relatively small initial class of 50 students, the facility was on par with key benchmarks at other leading medical schools.
“One thing that was really important to us was identifying schools to visit that had some relativity to what we were trying to do, like UCF, which is a new school. It was important for us to see what other new schools were doing,” says Olenick.
The team also visited Duke’s facility, since it offers an atypical one-year basic science curriculum, which the Dell Medical School also intended to do.
“Most traditional medical schools are a year and a half now, says Cox. “But we’re doing one-year basic sciences or preclinical, one-year clinical experience with some specialty training not normally incorporated in the clerkship years, and then we’re having everyone do geriatrics and palliative care. We have four dual degrees, and everybody is required to do a research project. Not a lab pipetting project, but a project focused around population health or addressing a clinical problem that needs to be solved.”
Anticipating the need for future expansion was also a key part of the straw program, which divided space planning into two phases.
“In addition to modeling phase one, we felt it was also important to model phase two to understand how the building might need to expand in the future,” says Olenick.
“We identified the monuments—the functional elements that couldn’t move,” says Pulito. “And then we tried to build soft space above it or recognize that we were eventually going to expand it horizontally. We knew the faculty and administrative floors were opportunities to expand vertically. And we knew we wanted to be able to expand the fourth and first floors horizontally in phase two.”
Social Edge + Community Space
A major component of the building design is the north-facing “social edge,” which consists of open spaces, collaboration rooms, and student breakout zones anchored by “Dell Mountain,” a glass-enclosed cantilevered staircase that connects all five floors.
“The social edge was a real concern for us, because it was a little more narrow than we would have liked and it is very public,” says Pulito. “We were wondering if students would really end up using it. To my surprise, they use it all the time. Everybody who comes in and out of the building bumps into each other, and that’s where a lot of the culture has started to develop.”
When the founding dean was selected, one of his top priorities was that the Dell Medical School serve as a community hub for bringing students, faculty, and disciplines together and driving increased interaction. This places greater emphasis on areas like the social edge and other community spaces, including the “faculty collegium,” a lounge space on the top floor with views of the capital that is open to faculty from across campus.
“We originally had glass walls on the student lounges along the social edge,” says Olenick. “At our first meeting with the founding dean, he suggested that it would be great if we could make those glass walls moveable so they opened directly into the social edge. We thought that was a great idea so we did it. They never close them now.”
“The whole building is built around transparency,” says Pulito. “I think one of the reasons we are seeing so much use of the small group rooms is because there is a lot of glass in them. There is a lot of co-use, not only by individuals, but by groups of people who are working together.”
Initial Assumptions + Evolving Realities
Based on benchmarks from other medical schools, the original straw program assumed the need for approximately 12,000 sf of administrative space, but by the time the official dean came onboard, that figure had increased to 22,000 sf.
“Finding that much administrative space within our 45,000 sf became a real challenge,” says Olenick. “We didn’t find all of it, but we were able to accommodate most of it.”
The team determined that the existing nursing school simulation facility could support the immersive component of the new simulation program with minor, cost-effective upgrades. As a result, only the core skills portion of the simulation program—accounting for 2,674 sf—is located in the new Health Learning Building. Approximately 7,000 sf of space was renovated in the nursing building to accommodate the rest of the simulation program. This ultimately allowed for a total of 16,800 sf feet of administrative space in phase one of the new building, with the additional required office space temporarily housed in other facilities until phase two. The entire process from the start of planning to initial occupancy took three years.
“We hit all of our benchmarks for timing and cost,” says Pulito. “Our initial goal was to complete construction in June 2016, which we did, on budget. The only caveat is that there is a bit of a gap between what constitutes a completed building for construction and occupancy, versus actually being able to teach in it.”
“You have to set assumptions in a discovery-driven planning process,” says Olenick. “And you need to check in on them and document them as you go, because they will change over time. By adjusting your assumptions along the way, you will hit your final milestones. But you need to have those touchpoints.”
By Johnathon Allen
