For Michael Murphy and the rest of the team at Boston- and Kigali, Rwanda–based MASS Design Group, finding design solutions to help control the spread of infection during an epidemic has become second nature. The firm’s first project, the Butaro District Hospital in Butaro, Rwanda, completed in 2011, was designed not only to provide a health care resource to hundreds of thousands who had been going without, but also to minimize the spread of a particularly virulent strain of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the facility’s waiting areas. Since then, the firm’s work has encompassed health care facilities to treat cholera patients in Haiti and design guidelines to fight the Ebola epidemic in Liberia.
Iwan Baan
GHESKIO Tuberculosis Hospital in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, designed by MASS Design Group.
At the end of March, the firm announced a COVID-19 response, devoting a section of its website to a collection of resources for architects, designers, and community members, with design guidelines to prevent the spread of infection in new and existing projects, as well as in tented emergency health care applications. More documents are on their way.
Iwan Baan
Alan Ricks and Michael Murphy (right) of MASS Design Group in the firm's Boston office.
In this podcast episode, Murphy speaks with ARCHITECT about MASS’s response, as well as how he thinks architecture and design are critical to fighting the spatial concerns presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, how it will affect the design industry, and how the lingering effects will change how we design buildings going forward.
Episode 48: MASS Design Group Is Using Design to Fight Infection, featuring Michael Murphy, is also available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and GooglePlay.
To read more about MASS Design Group, read the profile MASS In Context, which appeared in the May 2017 issue of ARCHITECT. This podcast was recorded on April 3, 2020, and produced by Katie Gerfen and Rob Grauert.
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