By Healthcare Facilities Today

Engineering the flow of foot traffic is a key part of the design of a future outpatient and research facility now under construction in Boston, according to an article on GlobeSt.com

The $450 million Brigham Building for the Future in the Longwood Medical Area of the city, foot traffic congestion is considered a catalyst for making the building a success.

Tom Sieniewicz, a partner with Boston-based NBBJ, the architectural firm designing the building, described the facility as a “very open building with lots of collisions and intersections.”  According to the article, the idea is for researchers and doctors to not only to have scheduled meetings in designated spaces, but to bump into each other in the hallways and common areas - like people do in a bustling city setting.

"Bringing translational research to the hospital campus is absolutely the purpose of this building," Sieniewicz said in the article. "Not just bringing a large concentration of research activity into the heart of the hospital, but bringing research spaces right into the building where patients meet with their clinicians. So there’s fantastic interaction between researchers, and clinicians, and patients."

The 11-story, 620,000-square foot building is currently under construction at the corner of Fenwood Road and Vining Street as part of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BHW) campus. It is scheduled for completion in fall 2016 and will allow the hospital system to consolidate researchers scattered in various locations.

“Even with today’s modern communication technology,” there’s nothing like a face-to-face meeting, Dr. Samuels said. “In reality, after such a meeting between a doctor and researcher, (that researcher) is more likely to go back to his own lab to work on solving a problem,”  said Dr. Martin Samuels, chairman of the Department of Neurology, in a video released by Brigham and Women’s.

Read the article.