It’s a unique challenge to design a place where no one wants to end up. When the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston started making plans several years ago to redesign its new children’s building—a facility where premature babies get ventilated in the intensive care unit and children with cancer endure the slow trauma of a life in treatment—its leaders decided early on that the new building needed a design that was as empathetic as possible to patients and families who would rather be anywhere else.
“This is not an environment that is on anybody’s life plan when they’re building a family,” says Dr. Mark Scheurer, a pediatric cardiologist and chief of children’s and women’s services at MUSC Health. “So how do you take that, say it out loud, think about it, and create an environment that actually makes them feel warm and that adjusts to the fact that this is their new normal? How do you do that thoughtfully?”
One of the first people they contacted was Kelly Loyd, a woman who had spent a lot of time at the previous facility. When she was 42, Loyd gave birth to twin girls more than 11 weeks premature. Months of treatments, surgeries, ventilation, and ICU care ensued, and though Loyd’s two daughters eventually emerged from the hospital healthy, the experience gave her some insight into the hospital’s design shortcomings, from the awkward location of its bathrooms to the lack of privacy between ICU bays that often held dying children and grieving parents. “It’s a really difficult place,” she says.
“They didn’t know what they were getting, because I really took that responsibility to heart,” she says. She recruited 26 other family members of previous patients to volunteer. They helped in selecting the architect for the project, the global design firm Perkins&Will in collaboration with McMillan Pazdan Smith Architecture, and were embedded with design teams focused on the various clinical departments, from the neonatal ICU to long-term care rooms to spaces designed for children on the autism spectrum.
“There’s not a clinical space that did not have family involvement when the building was designed,” Loyd says. “We wanted to keep the architects and the care team members always focused on the fact that the patient is at the center of everything.”
“Color is something that can really affect positively and negatively the children within this hospital. So we worked carefully to have the color be something subtle and natural,” says Manuel Cadrecha, architecture design principal at Perkins&Will. They tried to avoid imposing what he calls “an adult’s interpretation of what a child’s world would be like”—all gaudy colors and cartoon characters.
The design instead emphasizes natural light and access to outdoor spaces overlooking the Ashley River and Charleston Harbor, including a large balcony midway up the tower and a rooftop garden and play space. “It is possible to create beauty and delight and an uplifting space without knocking somebody over the head with visual clutter and noise and stimulus,” says Carolyn BaRoss, healthcare interiors design director for Perkins&Will.
Though Loyd’s experience with her premature twins is now more than 13 years in the past, she says the experience of advising the design of the new hospital was deeply rewarding. She was there on opening day and was one of a handful of people to walk the first baby in from the old facility.
“The day we moved in was extraordinarily emotional,” Loyd says. Based on what she went through, she knew that the baby and the baby’s family were heading into a place they never wanted to be. But with the new design she helped guide, she says, the experience would be as good as it could be. “To be able to create an environment, both an aesthetic design as well as a feeling, a sense of home, a sense of belonging, a sense of care that can surround you when you are in that place you really don’t want to be,” she says, “it’s kind of the least that we can do.”