Children’s Mental Healthcare Facilities
Three sites,one vision for children
Barbara Miszkiel, a senior principal leading Specialty Healthcare in the Toronto office of Stantec, explains how the creativity and skills of the architectural practice and the wider design team were put to excellent use in the design of three new facilities for children with physical and development disabilities, communication disorders, and autism, created for Ontario’s ErinoaKids Centre for Treatment and Development.
ErinoakKids Centre for Treatment and Development is Ontario in Canada’s largest Children’s Treatment Centre (CTC), serving over 15,000 children with disabilities and their families each year. Its clients have a wide range of physical and/or developmental disabilities, communication disorders, and autism, and some of the children the Centre looks after are blind and/or deaf. With around 650 staff, the main services offered by the CTC include Autism Services, Communication Services, Infant Hearing Screening, Medical Services, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy, and Vision Services. When the Centre decided to consolidate its 10 sites into three, it turned to Stantec and the wider design team to design purpose-built spaces for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). At Stantec we are continually educating ourselves about how these children perceive and respond to their physical environment. However, limited information and research exist on designing for children with ASD. With this fairly small body of evidence-based research, designing these spaces can be challenging. Our design team thus dared to think differently. We respected existing research and evidence-based design, while also embarking on some innovative thinking. With the help of the client, EOK, we challenged theories about design for children with ASD. The result? We designed three facilities that will not only help children with various challenges, but will also contribute to the body of research and evidence-based design for children with ASD.
THE DESIGN CHALLENGES
ErinoakKids’ existing 10 sites, which serve as learning centres, treatment centres, respite centres, and research sites, were ill-suited for modern approaches to treatment and education. Designing purpose-built spaces for EOK posed two primary challenges – EOK had to combine the myriad of sites into three new
20 THE NETWORK OCTOBER 2016
facilities, and has to address the needs of children aged from 0 to 19 years with multiple challenges, including emotional, visual and hearing, severe mobility issues, and ASD. To ease staff orientation across the
organisation, our design team created a similar concept for each of the three new sites – Oakville, Mississauga, and Brampton – but we also designed features unique to each. For each facility, a double-height Main Street and a central courtyard serve as organising elements. The Main Street accesses a gym with a climbing wall, a Family Resource Centre, education component, waiting areas, and central therapy. The Clinical pods, which function as physical therapy spaces, and an Intensive Behavioural Intervention (IBI) department for children with ASD, flank two sides of the courtyard. We designed the IBI department to avoid direct views into the courtyard in order to minimise distraction for children during treatment, therapy, and classroom time.
INTERACTIVE ELEMENTS Each two-storey site also has a feature stair, interior treehouses, and other interactive elements. We introduced colour as a playful accent both indoors and out, with wood and coloured aluminium exterior wall panels, exterior and interior splashes of soft-coloured glazing, and large interior abstract murals reflective of Canadian wildlife.
ADDRESSING VARYING NEEDS EOK’s second challenge for all three sites was to address the wide range of challenges, ages, and cultural backgrounds, by ensuring that each and every child would have similar opportunities and equal access to services, in order to help these children achieve optimal independence and wellbeing. Our objective was to support this goal and design space for a variety of end-users, their families, and staff. We wanted to design spaces that would both encourage and challenge children, including those with ASD, in a healing and interactive environment where they could celebrate their own successes. With EOK we were fortunate to have a client with immense experiential evidence in the impact of physical space on children with ASD, to add to the evidence-based research and design out there for public consumption. This gave us the opportunity to create an education and treatment centre where there is a fine balance between a stimulating and calming environment to inspire and support each child with ASD in every step of their development.
OTHER KEY CRITERIA Yet while we were focusing on design for children with ASD, we needed to address the needs of all children served by EOK. We also had to be mindful that this was a project to be delivered within the Alternate Financing Procurement (AFP) design competition process, known as Public Private Partnership (P3) in Ontario, where EOK is located. Together these priorities and processes drove innovation. So, what inspired us? A treehouse. The image of a special, adventurous place like a castle in the sky, and its physical manifestation, led to the three themes that guided our design: l Play. l Achievement. l Memory.
For each facility, a double-height ‘Main Street’ and a central courtyard serve as organising elements.
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