Designing with evidence
Posted in Information
Approaching each senior living project with vision and a forward-thinking perspective, c.c. hodgson architectural group has committed significant resources to architectural research. We have a long-standing belief in evidence-based design, which can greatly augment sound experience and judgment to further justify specific architectural concepts and approaches.
While Evidence-Based Design practices are now relatively commonplace among architectural firms specializing in healthcare and senior living design, Cornelia Hodgson recognized early in her career the significance of using information available from research, project evaluations, and other evidence gathered from operations. At a time when the field of senior living was evolving from simply being regarded as “elderly housing,” Cee Cee focused on the need to understand the process of aging and incorporated this thinking in her designs – leading to her unwavering belief that environments affect peoples’ behavior, that design matters.
Her early appreciation of research led her to extensively review the studies that were being conducted at that time on aging and the environment’s impact on quality of life, ultimately focusing on person-center environments. However, with limited data on the specialized area of senior living, we took the highly unusual move to hire a dedicated in-house architectural researcher whose sole focus was conducting behavioral mapping, post-occupancy evaluations and most importantly, educating staff on gerontological design and evidence-based design research outcomes.
c.c. hodgson architectural group’s involvement in evidence-based design has been comprehensive and has grown from post-occupancy evaluations to credible industry-based surveys, especially three wellness-related studies, that are being used as a basis for future research work in the field.
