In order to go back to school to get my Master of Architecture degree I had to make a design portfolio to send the prospective schools. The only problem was I had never made a design portfolio before. All of the ones before were just based off of my current work but the schools made it apparent they wanted portfolios that showed off creative conceptual designs. So I had to get to work creating stuff. I solicited programs from people I knew and that’s when I got an orthopedic surgical office located in Florida, U.S.A. I had to tell them this was just for design purposes and not going to be what they wanted.

The program they provided was the following:

• Two operating rooms
• Two large conference rooms
• Offices
• Break room
• Recovery rooms
• Lunch room

There were others but I felt with this I could get a start on a design.

The first thing I wanted to do was figure out a way to incorporate Florida into the design. I came up with the idea of looking like you were under the water looking up You would see the ripples of the water being the main focus. Another thing I have noticed about Florida is the amount of rain they get every day. So I made the building to be the shape of a cloud with rounded edges and a curved roof.

I had never done an inpatient medical facility before so there were a few things I had to learn. Especially with it being in Florida and having different building codes than I was used to. For starters, the aisles had to be much bigger as well as elevator capacity. I didn’t know what size the operating rooms needed to be so I had to extrapolate.

There are a couple of things, looking at it now, I would drastically change to make it fit better and to also make it an operable building. But, in the end, it was just for design purposes and not meant to be actually built.

Project Information:

Portfolio Design Project

Fall 2021