I start my fifth year in a month or so, and fifth year is a 3-quarter long thesis studio. I've been thinking about what I want to do for that studio because the more prepared you are the better things tend to go. Especially because my advisor is known to be a tough cookie.
Anyway, the idea I am working with is a biomedical research center, not a rebuilding of the sort of facility we have now, but a totally new kind of research center: one aimed at fostering creative research and bringing people together in their work.
I began with the idea of a product development cycle. This might be a drug, a new medical treatment, a device, whatever. Instead of working from a traditional product development cycle, which would result in a traditional building, I designed a development cycle based on biology, most specifically conception through maturity. There are a lot of good parallels there to exploit, and this is my preferred way of working, anyway.
One thing big businesses do that this model explicitly tries to avoid is extreme growth. It's my opinion that when workgroups get to be larger than about 20 people, those people cannot talk to each other every day or work effectively as a single team. They break up into smaller teams and lose touch. Being too large to be born is a serious issue, and one that was a limiting factor on human evolution (despite common belief, it's very rare for a baby to be too large to fit through the birth canal).
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