“Inpatient unit design”: An architectural Flexibility in healthcare infrastructure

ABSTRACT The pace & intensity of change are greater in hospitals than in other types of building. One of the challenges facing the architecture profession in 21st century therefore is how to design a flexible hospital to suit unpredictable needs. [1] Hospitals, like cities, are also never finished. In the best cases, architectural infrastructures retain value and maintain coherence over many decades of change the interior layouts mutate, evolve and alter in response to the dynamics of the health care field and additions are made to the original buildings. In the worst cases, architectural infrastructures fall out of favor, and are found incapable of accommodating varying cycles of change with the result that entire facilities, after several stages of functional downgrading, have to be demolished because they lack agility. [2] So every healthcare infrastructure should be flexible in terms of architectural design with respect to adaptability, convertibility, expandability with the time axis and this flexibility is only possible when the departments/ units inside the infrastructure are self sustain/ independent on itself for flexibility. Thus, this paper is based on architectural design strategies for a flexible inpatient unit in a healthcare infrastructure. Keywords: Healthcare infrastructure, Flexibility, Inpatient unit, Architectural design strategies