Representations of Waiting

UG Thesis

Year: 2020 : Hospital Advisor: Kristy Balliet

For a place that is incredibly still (you sit), the medical waiting room is a place of radical transformation. It is a literal threshold, seeing as it is not a final destination but rather a temporary stop on our way to somewhere else. The medical waiting room also marks a moment of an internal transformation as one’s identity moves from “person” to that of “patient”.

It is for these heterotopic of the waiting room, that I associate it with a previous study of mine: the rug. Being a powerful object for effectively demarcating space, the rug is an architectural tool in generating real personal territory, through purely representing it. It does this by framing the user both in form and in graphic. The carpet also jumps scale, as the graphics and construction of early carpets were references to Persian gardens; otherwise known as paradise.

I see a useful connection for thinking of the space of the waiting room and the abstract space of the rug side by side. Since the waiting room strips its occupant of agency through a sort of singling out of the individual, the other provides comfort to its user by referencing a larger community. The two together opens an opportunity for healthcare designs that privileges the collective over the individual.

The form of this building services by thinking of the waiting room as one large interior landscape. If traditionally we see a series of small waiting rooms sprinkled throughout the hospital, divided by department, this hospital aggregates the waiting space into one. Certain outpatient services take place within this waiting space, like eye exams, early check ups and are dispersed like follies. This waiting landscape is signaled through its landscaped roof, which touches

down on the site at two of its corners. It becomes a new ground, and a public sloping park, but it also is a functional amenity to the hospital, so patients in rehabilitation, can use this outdoor space for exercise and physical therapy treatment. Underneath the undulating roof, is an interior landscape of waiting space. Outpatient services like eye exams, yearly checkups, and vitals take place within this waitingscape. They are placed like follies, keeping in mind their adjacencies to one another to maintain efficiency. They break up the otherwise constant arrangement of seating and align to an over scaled tile pattern, that starts to echo the carpets concept of “framing” and notion of “personal territory” that I am pushing forward. Similar to the idea of “hiding in plain site” mentality, the more activity the more privacy for the patient.

Through the design of this imagined waiting cape, this project hopes to reclaim the hospital typology as an architectural project and one that belongs to public urban infrastructure.

Thesis Merit Award