220 replies to this topic

[LJ]

I find RJH much brighter and more welcoming than VGH.

[Nparker]

I find RJH much brighter and more welcoming than VGH.

Agreed. The interior of the new patient care centre at RJH is much more pleasant than VGH. I suspect it's the ho-hum exterior of the tower that raises the most objections.

[lanforod]

I just spent 3 days at vgh. It's fine. It's a hospital, not a hotel. You're not supposed to want to stay there.
Food is pretty good though.

[AllseeingEye]

I find RJH much brighter and more welcoming than VGH.

Agreed; I've had surgery at both hospitals and there is no comparison in terms of both pre- and post-operative facilities. Of course naturally the RJH tower being newer it, like Carey Road, incorporates many features and above all the "lessons learned" by the system in terms of patient care and that includes internal building layout and design.

 

Once again - and this seems to be lost on certain posters - when your appendix explodes or its discovered late in the game you have an aggressive form of cancer, considering above all the finite resource$ available to fund all aspects of the system - specialized medical equipment, specialist staff and yes the design of the physical plant - the exterior design of any medical facility is of minor concern when it comes to the quality of the care which quite obvously can make the difference between living or dying.

 

For those concerned about design I point out, last time I checked, "health" takes up approximately 50% of the entire provincial budget; at the time I believe the actual dollars for the MoH were in the range of $15-20 billion annually. Hardly chump change. And that was a few years ago therefore safe to presume that number has gone up, significantly.

 

Considering all of these facilities - assisted living, long term care and the general hospitals - are chronically and perpetually under-staffed, including BTW the new RJH tower, which when I was there had an entire wing "dark" due to lack of funding for both beds and trained staff - as both an occasional patient/user of the system and as someone with a family member in it for the remainder of her life - if there are any extra dollars floating about and it comes down to a choice of paying more $ for an architect and "superior" exterior design, or providing funding to ensure the staffing is where it needs to be to save and / or care for lives, I know where I would elect to spend those scarce bucks.

 

Sure Carey Road could be landscaped better and building "form" or "street interaction" possibly improved, but until the funding is available to have more than 2-3 staff (and note only one of those is an actual medical/LPN resource) on a wing at any given time caring for 20 or more dementia patients, then the exterior physical form of the facility will always take a back seat in my book: guarantee me adequate funding for staffing to ensure superior round the clock patient care, and then I'll happily hop on board the "let's design a better mousetrap" train...

[Mike K.]

ASE, we get all of that, but we can still opine on the mediocre, uninspired design. It doesn't have to cost more for something better, I suppose is the concensus, and we have a world of institutional buildings that prove the point.

[VicHockeyFan]

I just spent 3 days at vgh. It's fine. It's a hospital, not a hotel. You're not supposed to want to stay there.
Food is pretty good though.

 

Ah, but if we had a hybrid system, we would have some nice hospitals you'd like to live in.

[AllseeingEye]

ASE, we get all of that, but we can still opine on the mediocre, uninspired design. It doesn't have to cost more for something better, I suppose is the concensus, and we have a world of institutional buildings that prove the point.

Show me the proof of this and I'll happily be among the converted.

 

However using Carey Road as an example I cannot see how better landscaping or more "inspired" design could possibly come cheaply. Landscaping alone on a property of that size, several acres worth, would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars minimum, likely much more, never mind presumably the additional costs for "better design", whatever that means. To paraphrase another poster its a care facility, not the "Louvre West". Got unlimited funding? Fine. Go crazy, fill your boots. Make it look like the Taj Mahal, BC-style for all I care. 

[Mike K.]

You know priorities are in the right place when a homeless shelter (Our Place) looks better than a long-term care facility for seniors.

 

We can do better. We simply chose not to. Hopefully with DHK at the helm with the Hillside Ave facility we'll see something worthy of such a high profile location.

[G-Man]

This site could be a great location for some ground floor commercial that would actually bring in money that could be used by the system to pay for more care or amenities for the people that are in the facility.

[VicHockeyFan]

Ground-breaking event today, according to the TC.

 

Of course they did not say who was there, have a photo, or any photos of the project.

 

http://www.timescolo...lside-1.2286075

[sebberry]

I like the concept of this "Dementia Village" in the Netherlands:

http://gizmodo.com/i...with-1526062373


Are we sure that a XX-shaped institution really represents the pinnacle in senior/dementia/end-of-life care?  

I can understand what ASE is saying in terms of designing a building best suited for the purpose it'll be serving, but this looks a little too much like Rikers Island to me...

[Mike K.]

Here's our first peek. The architects will be supplying VV with better visuals soon.

 

This image is courtesy of the Quadra-Hillside Community Association.

 

[Dr.Doinglittle]

So it's 320 units for complex need and dementia patients. Do we know if patients are going to be confined to the building? Or be able to come and go at all?

[Mixed365]

I like the concept of this "Dementia Village" in the Netherlands:

http://gizmodo.com/i...with-1526062373


Are we sure that a XX-shaped institution really represents the pinnacle in senior/dementia/end-of-life care?  

I can understand what ASE is saying in terms of designing a building best suited for the purpose it'll be serving, but this looks a little too much like Rikers Island to me...

This is a guess:

They chose the X-design so every individual in a room gets a great view (like the hotels in Las Vegas). I'm sure this is especially important since in care homes, the individuals stay in doors all the time. Could you image being 90 years old and having a window that looks at a blank wall? 
 

[amor de cosmos]

i don't question whether that this building will serve its purpose, which is the most important thing, or whether it's needed or whatever but it looks to me like that was the only thing they considered. looks like a missed opportunity to improve the whole neighbourhood.
 

Few disagree that the facility is needed, but the size of the building, and the loss of the existing greenspace, has raised some concerns for those who live in the area.

Kelly Greenwell, executive director of the nearby Quadra Village Community Centre, wants to see the design include outdoor areas the whole community can use.

"I don't think you can drop a facility this size into a residential neighbourhood on a former school field and not make plans for those things," he said.

http://www.cbc.ca/ne...ction-1.3650089

Edited by amor de cosmos, 24 June 2016 - 08:57 AM.

[VicHockeyFan]

Is it mostly underground parking?  It would have been cool to make it big enough to let Evergreen Terrace residents also park under it, and then reclaim the Evergreen parking lot for more green space (or more social housing, Ms. Helps?).  But alas, that might require too much cooperation by different arms of government to ever make it work. 

 

[Nparker]

It's still going to be an improvement to the neighbourhood, just not the improvement some might have wanted.

[AllseeingEye]

So it's 320 units for complex need and dementia patients. Do we know if patients are going to be confined to the building? Or be able to come and go at all?

Typically any patient can come and go as_long_as they are signed out and accompanied by an immediate family member.

 

At Carey Road for the complex / extended care residents there is a sign in procedure at the main floor reception, then each separate wing on each floor has a unique encoded electronic keypad outside each door requiring a manual input by the visitor.

 

Once on the wing and before the resident can be escorted outside - either down to the main public-cafe area, outside in the protected secure courtyard, much like the rendering for the new Hillside/Quadra facility, or especially for offsite visitation purposes - the family member has to sign another register specifically FYI for the caregivers/LPN's on that wing with Time Out/Expected Time In, Family Member Name etc., information all being required. Brentwood House had a similar system. The new facility will certainly have its version of this sign out procedure as well. Not sure if these safeguards apply to the assisted living residents (Carey Road has one floor devoted to them, presume the new facility will have at least that much space or more) since by definition they are mentally competent, their mental faculties being unimpaired by any form of dementia. I therefore presume those folks can come and go as they please assuming no physical barriers to mobility.

[aastra]

If we were so concerned about views and green space then why didn't they build two or three (connected) mini towers? Voila, you preserve a ton of green space (maybe half of the property), you give residents the best possible situations in terms of light and views, and the format is 100% urban and allows for some variation in styles and massing between the sections, instead of looking like a monotone copy-and-paste institutional housing project from decades ago.

 

This project is big. Google's overhead view suggests that it will be the biggest thing in the neighbourhood by a large margin. Look at the rendering and stack the sections in your mind and you'll see that we're really talking about a complex roughly equivalent to View Towers in size. And yet every one of Victoria's supposed principles re: context sensitivity and appropriateness and design went out the window once again. Funny how that always seems to happen with these exceptionally large public projects, even as the tiniest private projects get put through the wringer. Hey, remind me, haven't some comparably tiny projects in CSV been dragged out for frickin' ever over every little detail? But Quadra's village? Nobody gives a crap.

 

Re: x-shaped institutional buildings, the format is essentially generic and pays no heed whatsoever to context. Put this same development on Carey Road or in Gordon Head or a dozen miles away on the peninsula somewhere and it would literally be almost exactly the same. It's a generic x-shaped institutional complex that doesn't face the street directly and that doesn't relate to or acknowledge anything around it. The particulars of the site are irrelevant. Just drop it in.

 

It's those Victorian inconsistencies re: development (and other things) that continue to drive me batty.

[aastra]

Something else: you know this whole issue today about how houses are being demolished and it's such a crisis in the making and all of that? Check out this picture and zoom in on the Blanshard/Rose neighbourhood and try to count how many houses were destroyed effectively in one fell swoop as part of that whole misguided urban renewal effort. Maybe 100 houses, give or take a few? And we're not talking about 100 houses in one year, all over the city. We're talking about 100 houses in one neighbourhood. Heck, in one spot in one neighbourhood.

 

And then I think about all of those postwar Fairfield and James Bay apartment blocks and how many houses must have been erased to build them.

 

I'm still concerned about wiping out old houses today, don't get me wrong. But methinks what's happening today is a drop in the bucket compared to what happened from ~1950->1980 or thereabouts.

Edited by aastra, 24 June 2016 - 11:13 AM.