Healthcare Design - January 2015 - 36

The HCD 10: Educator
George Mann, AIA
Ronald L. Skaggs, FAIA, Endowed
Professor of Health Facilities Design,
College of Architecture, Texas A&M
University (College Station, Texas)

Top: A rendering created by Mann's Texas A&M environmental
design students Kevin Marek and Jacob Richie of the proposed
Thompson & Grace Medical City in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria. Above:
Graduate architecture student Celso Rojas presents his design
concept for rapidly deployable Ebola virus clinics.

HCDmagazine.com 02.15

healthcare design professions. He was the first holder of the Skaggs-Sprague
Endowed Chair of Health Facilities Design at Texas A&M, the former director of
the International Union of Architects/Public Health Group, cofounder and former
president of Global University Programs in Healthcare Architecture, and founder
and advisory board chairman of The RPD (Resource Planning & Development)
Group.
Year in review: Mann and his students received national and international
attention in 2014 when they undertook a project to research and design rapidly
deployable modular isolation units for Ebola patients and others suffering from
communicable diseases. The 13-day project was conducted in September in
collaboration with retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. P.K. Carlton Jr., a former Air
Force Surgeon General, in response to the mounting epidemic overseas-and
before Ebola ever reached U.S. soil. (For more, see page 16.) Other notable
projects include two hospitals that were designed in collaboration with HKS for
the Thompson & Grace Medical City in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria, including a 400-bed
women's and children's hospital, the first children's hospital in the country of 180
million people. He and his students also undertook the design of the new north
campus ambulatory care and sports medicine satellite facility for Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children in Dallas. The recipient of numerous awards and
recognitions throughout his career, Mann added one more to the list in 2014: the
International Academy for Design & Health's Lifetime Leadership Award.
What's next: This year, Mann and his students will touch even more international destinations, with plans to design an 80-bed hospital in Honduras during
the spring semester and a medical city project in East Africa. His spring 2015
research and design studio will dig into improving health and hospitals in Latin
America and the Caribbean. And his long-range goals are even more ambitious.
Mann has been working to strengthen the university's interdisciplinary architecture for health research and design center, in collaboration with Texas A&M's
Health Science Center, to explore the latest solutions in design, construction,
and operational research to improve access to and quality of healthcare in both
developed and developing regions. His vision is to identify a younger generation
of faculty leadership, as well as to design and build a new facility, to prepare for
the tremendous worldwide health challenges ahead.-JKS

RENDERING BY JACOB RICHIE AND KEVIN MAREK (NIGERIA); RICHARD NIRA (EBOLA)

Who he is: Mann arrived at Texas A&M in
1966, charged with launching the university's
Architecture for Health program. Since that time,
Mann has become widely known throughout the
industry-an HCD 10 nomination dubbed him
the "grandfather/godfather/dean of healthcare
design education in the U.S."-and hundreds
have graduated from the university's master's program. Over the years, Mann has
led more than 700 practice-based research and design studio projects all over
the world, linking present students with graduates now immersed in their own

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Healthcare Design - January 2015

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