Family Health Center on Virginia / MASS Design Group

Curated by Hana Abdel

Architects: MASS Design Group
Area: 25000 ft²
Year: 2021
Photographs: Iwan Baan
Manufacturers: Herman Miller

Text description provided by the architects. MASS Design Group, a design collective dedicated to delivering architecture that promotes justice and human dignity, celebrated the completion of the Family Health Center on Virginia in McKinney, Texas. Located in North Texas’s Collin County, the 25,000-square-foot community health center is a patient-centered medical home serving children, families, and individuals, regardless of their ability to pay.

The health center is part of a partnership led by the North Texas Family Health Foundation to expand healthcare access and improve health and wellness outcomes and health equity in McKinney and throughout North Texas. Design architects of more than a dozen medical facilities and labs across the globe, this is MASS Design Group’s first U.S.-designed medical facility.

Externally, the health center is designed to look like buildings in a residential neighborhood. The building has a traditional gable roof, repeated to create a village, suggesting that multiple services and forms of care and people exist there. The design concept mimics traditional Texan breezeway houses, or “Dogtrot houses,” which are characterized by multiple buildings connected by a breezeway and common roof.

Family Health Center Design - The health center brings together essential healing and care components including clinical, community, and exam space. While modern medical facilities always offer clinical and exam space, community space, which is often overlooked, was also prioritized. The design was intended to feel welcoming and familiar like a community center. To deinstitutionalize this building, MASS broke down the large volume of the overall clinic to a human scale. A critical component of the center is the purposeful design of designated pods for primary care, dental, staff, and education zones, allowing for more efficient use of space and care of patients:

Clinical: Supports team-based care and designated space for medical staff to work and review patients’ information and test results. Providing adequate and comfortable space designed to support the medical staff is essential to help ensure continuity of care to patients.
Integration of Services: the design of the facility allows for better integration of care among services lines, including that of primary medical and behavioral health – making care more accessible and reducing stigma.

Community: Creating spaces similar to that found in a home at a medical facility is known to reduce tension, reduce perceptions of wait times, and increase perceptions of experience satisfaction. The community spaces include a series of waiting and reception areas modeled after the home – places to dine, work, relax, and play. Less clinical spaces in medical facilities have been shown to reduce anxiety for patients and their loved ones.

Exam: The exam room is where patients interact with medical professionals, ranging from physicians and dentists to counselors. The new design of the spaces enables patients to be partners with their medical professionals on their care. The North Texas Family Health Foundation partnered with Herman Miller and WRG, a member of Herman Miller’s Certified Dealer network to design and furnish the facility to ensure health and productivity were kept in mind.