Building With a Mission

By Nicole Wallace

When R. Leslie Nichols leads training sessions to help officials think about how to design local Boys & Girls

ALSO SEE: Special Report: About Charities and Design Charities and Design: A Sampling of Resources

Clubs, he often asks participants to walk around the room on their knees.

"That's the perspective of a kid who's maybe 7 years old coming into the club, and it changes everything," says Mr. Nichols, vice president for club safety and design at Boys & Girls Clubs of America, in Atlanta. "All of a sudden the height of the ceiling, which seemed OK as a standing adult, is very foreboding, or the door is very intimidating."

Like the participants in Mr. Nichols's seminars, leaders of many types of nonprofit groups are starting to think more seriously about the connection between their charitable missions and the physical spaces in which their work takes place.

Hospitals are finding that changes to the layout of their buildings, such as expanding the number of private rooms with exposure to natural light, can help patients heal faster. Housing groups are experimenting with ways to add flourishes to apartments, such as porches and trim, to personalize the units and help residents in low-cost developments become more a part of the surrounding neighborhoods. International charities are rethinking the layout of refugee camps and other temporary living spaces with an eye toward providing psychological comfort as well as shelter after devastating disasters.

Charities' heightened interest in design and architecture comes at a time when an increasing number of people in those fields — especially young professionals and students — are seeking ways to use their skills to benefit society.

"When I was in design school in the 1980s, everyone was focused on the newest cutting-edge skyscraper design or who was the hottest, flashiest designer," says Scott Ball, president of the Association for Community Design, a network of nonprofit design organizations and individuals interested in public-interest architecture, which is based in Atlanta. He says the same cannot be said of the students in architecture school today. "There's a new generation coming out that's once again interested in being socially proactive and community-oriented."

In the past four years, Mr. Ball says, 20 to 30 new "community-design centers" have been started. The movement, he says, got its start in the 1970s, the last period to see such a wave of interest among architects to use design to tackle social issues.

Some of the centers focus on a specific topic, such as urban planning or housing for migrant farmworkers. Others are fledgling, one-person operations, in some cases simply an architect's evening and weekend project. But many of the more-established centers are independent nonprofit groups — often outgrowths of a local chapter of the American Institute of Architects — or programs at schools of architecture.

Growing Demand

Efforts to match recent architecture-school graduates with nonprofit organizations have been overwhelmed by demand — from both young architects and the local charities seeking their services.

Two years ago, Enterprise Community Partners, in Columbia, Md., received 70 applications for just four spots in its Frederick P. Rose Architectural Fellowship program, which was started with a $5.5-million gift from the Rose Family Foundation in memory of the prominent New York real-estate developer. The goal of the fellowship program is to bring better design to low-cost housing and create a cadre of socially minded architects by placing recent graduates at housing or community-development organizations for three years.

Housing organizations have long felt that architectural services were a luxury they could not afford, says Bart Harvey, chief executive officer of Enterprise Community Partners, which until recently was called the Enterprise Foundation. He says he understands that attitude, but believes its consequences extend beyond aesthetics.

"Even if you take a Habitat house, which is good, decent affordable housing, if you put a bunch of them together without any architectural design, you're creating a place that says, 'This is low-income,'" says Mr. Harvey.

So many charities have requested the help of architectural fellows that Enterprise has restructured the program to help it grow.

Now, instead of using the Rose gift to pay the full costs of the program, Enterprise is working with housing groups to raise money to pay for it. The Rose gift provides $1 for every $2 that the community group raises. The Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, in San Francisco, and the Collins Foundation, in Portland, Ore., are among the first grant makers to support fellows.

The program currently has 12 fellows working at charities across the country.

Studies Show Results

New research on the correlation between building design and the results of a charity's work, particularly in health care, has helped fuel new interest in architecture among nonprofit groups.

One study found that among patients admitted to an institution for bipolar depression, hospital stays were 3.7 days shorter for patients whose rooms faced east and received direct morning sunlight, compared with patients in rooms facing west. At another hospital, patients recovering from surgery whose rooms looked out at trees had shorter stays, needed less-potent pain medication, and suffered fewer complications than patients who underwent the same procedure but whose views were of the brick wall of a nearby building.

Other studies have documented noise levels in hospital settings and their effect on patients' heart rates, anxiety levels, and quality of sleep.

Thirty-four hospitals now are working with the Center for Health Design, in Concord, Calif., to incorporate the findings of such studies into the design of their new buildings and then document the medical and financial effects of those design elements.

One of the institutions — Dublin Methodist Hospital, just outside of Columbus, Ohio — broke ground last year on its new hospital. The organization looked to research data as it designed the new facility's patient rooms, all of which will be private and have access to sunlight.

Staff members will be able to adapt the rooms as patients' conditions change, eliminating the need for transfers from one unit to another, which can be stressful to patients and can increase the possibility of medical errors. Each room will have an identical layout to make it easier for doctors and nurses to provide needed care fast without having to figure out where equipment and supplies are located in a particular room.

The room layout also includes a sizeable family area that will include a double-bed sleeper sofa, a television, and even a small refrigerator for snacks and beverages.

Support from family and friends is "enormously important" to a patient's state of mind, says Cheryl L. Herbert, president of Dublin Methodist. When families feel welcome and comfortable, she says, they are more likely to be involved in their loved ones' care.

"Families are often very aware of what's going on with their family members and can help staff understand patient behavior," says Ms. Herbert, "or potentially intervene and prevent errors from occurring."

She says having research showing the impact of such design details has been critical as she talks with board members, donors, and members of the public. "It begins to help people understand that it isn't just one person's ideas of what would be nice to have, but that there really is a business case for building in this fashion," she says.

Online Plans

While sharing research and ideas is important, one organization wants to go a step further and encourage architects to share plans.

Architecture for Humanity, in Sausalito, Calif., is a worldwide network of 3,000 architects, many of whom put their skills to work designing structures in the developing world. But, says Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of the organization, finding out about all the work being done has been difficult. So Architecture for Humanity is building an online database to bring information about such projects together in one place.

The goal is to provide more than just case studies, but also construction drawings, materials lists, cost estimates, and other information. The organization is working to develop a licensing system that would allow architects to share their ideas and plans in developing countries while still enjoying full copyright protections in developed countries.

Charities could adapt the ideas in the database to fit the conditions of the regions in which they are working. Then, says Mr. Sinclair, charities could report on the modifications they made.

"We want you to come back and say, 'You know what, we tried using bamboo, and it didn't work. We actually used a different material, and this is what it looks like,'" he says. "Think of design as evolution. With localized issues, the species evolve."

Architecture for Humanity got a big boost on the project when Mr. Sinclair was named a winner of the TED prize at Sun Microsystems' annual Technology, Entertainment, Design conference in February. Technology experts at the conference are helping the organization think through the design of the project, and Sun has committed to developing the technology necessary to run the online database, which the organization hopes to start by the end of the year.

'What Good Looks Like'

For Boys & Girls Clubs of America, using the Internet to share basic design information has already meant that local clubs can tackle more-complex design issues than before.

Visitors to the organization's KidBuilding site learn that placing the games room so that it is visible from the entrance helps convey a sense of fun from the moment a child enters the building, and that couches, beanbag chairs, and rugs can make a study area more inviting. The site features a calculator that helps clubs figure out how much space they will need based on the number of kids they expect to serve and the programs they plan to offer. It also has sample floor plans, color schemes, and a photo gallery showing examples of well-designed clubs.

Mr. Nichols, of Boys & Girls Clubs of America, believes that the Web site and the organization's emphasis on good design have raised clubs' expectations for their building projects.

"When people can see what good looks like — not just good, but what does better look like — they find a way to try to get it," he says. "The difference between the conversations I had 10 years ago with clubs about quality standards and today is dramatically different. It comes down to providing more examples of what better is like."

Grant makers too are turning their attention to the relationship between architecture and mission.

The Kresge Foundation, in Troy, Mich., uses both its grant making and its new state-of-the-art headquarters to help persuade grant recipients to incorporate "environmentally friendly" features into their buildings.

"You would assume that an organization in the conservation movement or in the environmental community, of course they would be interested in doing a green building," says John E. Marshall III, Kresge's president. "But how do you drive this technology into other fields where it's not necessarily expected?"

Since late 2003, the foundation has awarded $4.5-million in planning grants to 71 groups. Kresge has also awarded $7.2-million in bonus grants of $150,000 to $250,000 each to 42 of its grantees whose buildings have been certified through the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system.

Kresge joins the growing list of grant makers — including the California Wellness, Hewlett, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations — that are constructing green headquarters.

For the 19,500-square-foot building that opened on the foundation's campus in February, more than a quarter of the building materials were recycled, and more than three-quarters of them came from within 500 miles of the site, cutting down on the fuel used to transport them. Forty geothermal wells plunge 400 feet into the earth, moving heat from the ground into the building in the winter and out of the building in the summer. The building's roofs will be planted with drought-resistant plants native to the region, which will help cut heating and cooling costs and the amount of stormwater that runs off the building and into the sewage system.

The foundation estimates that the environmental features added about 20 percent to the cost of the $14.5-million building project. Mr. Marshall says Kresge sees the new building as an opportunity to test and report on newer, more experimental technology on behalf of charities. "We'll demonstrate the successes and things that don't work so well," he says.

Low-Budget Options

The benefits of good design aren't limited to groups that have multimillion-dollar budgets.

When the Alzheimer's Family Day Center, in Fairfax, Va., moved into its current space, 5,000 square feet in a suburban office park, the organization's use of design was very deliberate.

It created an L-shaped path from the main program rooms to the bathroom as a way to incorporate wandering, a symptom of the disease, into the program as acceptable activity. A handrail in a darker, contrasting color both provides support and helps with coordination of motor skills.

The program room for people with mid-stage Alzheimer's is painted in bright blues and yellows to stimulate activity. But the room for people in the late stages of the disease, when stimulation becomes more difficult to handle, is painted in softer, more soothing colors.

"None of this was really high cost," says Blair Blunda, the center's executive director. "You're going to be painting anyway."