Healthcare Design - September 2021 - 18

ARCHITECT
DOUGLAS KING
AIA, NCARB, ACHA, Vice President, National Healthcare Sector
Lead, Project Management Advisors Inc. (Chicago)
D
OUGLAS KING'S 41-YEAR career has
been dedicated to helping healthcare
systems around the world
design, develop, and renovate
facilities that respond to emerging
industry trends. Specifically, his work has
focused on broad topics such as community
health/population health management, vertical
building design for limited land use, and
rapid response to emergencies such as natural
disasters and global pandemics-serving
as critical expertise for the latter last year. In
spring 2020, King helped oversee the conversion
of three halls within Chicago's McCormick
Place, the largest convention center in North
America, into an alternate care facility with
3,000 beds for COVID-19 patients. The project
was completed in just 25 days. King's involvement
with the McCormick Place conversion
led to his participation in crafting the new U.S.
healthcare standards addressing emergency
response for the Facility Guidelines Institute's
2022 document update, in which the project
will serve as a case study.
Prior to the pandemic, King worked on some
of the largest hospital projects in the world,
overseeing vertical developments as a strategy
to build hospitals closer to urban population
centers while allowing adequate program space
for outpatient services, research, and medical
education (for example, Northwestern Memorial
Hospital's Feinberg Pavilion and Galter Pavilion
and Prentice Women's Hospital). In 2021,
he was appointed to the Urban Land Institute's
ULI Health Leaders Network and is collaborating
with public health experts in examining the
role of large-scale hospitals in urban settings. He
also represents the healthcare community in the
worldwide Council on Tall Buildings and Urban
Habitats organization.
Additionally, in the past year King expanded
his focus on what he calls " forgotten spaces " -
areas dedicated for mechanical/electrical/
18
SEP TEMBER 2021
plumbing, IT, and fire protection systems. His
research on these areas has shown they account
for more than 12 percent of space in a high-rise
facility, and when combined with structural elements
like stairs, elevators, and exterior walls
exceed 25 percent of total space within large
structures. Through benchmarking, King has
created guidance that allows projects to better
anticipate this square footage in early design and
avoid cost overruns that arise when those spatial
needs are overlooked in programming. King also
continues to serve as adjunct faculty at both the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and
the University of Kansas and gives workshops
and lectures at numerous other institutions and
industry events.
WHAT INDUSTRY CHALLENGE DO YOU HOPE
TO SOLVE?
I'd like to create a commonly understood process
for developing community health-related
projects and, in tandem, create a repository for
knowledge on strategies that have been proven
through research to benefit improvement of
public health within community health settings.
These two efforts would further attract
those in the development community to invest
in community health projects.
WHAT DID YOU LEARN OVER THE PAST YEAR?
The big aha for me was how concerns for
health design have permeated our entire society.
Examples include the ability of surfaces to
transmit virus, the behavior of air systems in
transmitting virus, the one-way fl ow of people
through buildings-these were all concepts
that are familiar to those of us in healthcare
planning and design but became commonplace
in our culture worldwide. An outcome of
this societal awareness is an appreciation for
healthcare design and the importance in our
daily lives of an informed/educated body politic
about public health matters.
HCDMAGAZINE.COM
http://www.HCDMAGAZINE.COM
Healthcare Design - September 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Healthcare Design - September 2021
