“Once challenged, the architect will find completely new shapes and means to produce the hospital, but he cannot know what the doctor knows.” –Louis Kahn (Twombley, 1964, 184)

Anderson divides the philosophy of the DOCHITECT model into four points. (Jackson, 2020)

1. Take Cues from Domestic Architecture: Design can be an important tool in care strategies. Design solutions have the ability to combat confusion and spatial disorientation. Patient rooms, for example, could have acoustic control, a clock, windows to maintain circadian rythyms and space for family. In other places like hospital hallways and in front of elevators, floor patterns that are dark in color can be perceived as a void for someone with a cognitive impairment. Substituting the sterile, clinical enviroment for one that is more domestic will emotionally change buildings of medicine.
2. Nuture staff well-being: Often architectural spaces dedicated to medical care lack windows, and/or approriate lighting as well as external spaces of retreat where both patients and doctors alike reset. Virtual windows and day-night skylights could also be implemented to Anderson advocates for the creation of such spaces at night-time, combatting the eerieness and stillness of hospitals during that time of day.
3. Breaking down hierachies: Moving away from the normative hierachial set-up of doctor behind desk and patient on exam table – by incorporating a round table with at least three comfortable, equally designed chairs – introduces the idea that everyone who is seated is equal to one another. This invites collaboration between patient and physician. 
4. Change the focal point: Patient room design should move away from bed-as-focal-point in a room. Instead, architecture should encourage patients to get out of bed by blurring the hospital–home dichotomy.

Anderson speculates future trends in healthcare design will likely include areas of respite for staff, supporting need for short periods of rest giving the changing practice of medicine to a work-shift model. In addition, increased time required for computer documentation and decreased time at the bedside with patients will likely have design implications; additional staff work areas and specific documentation zones will need to be planned, allowing for flexibility and acoustic privacy. Finally, with the increasing complexity of chronic illness and an aging population, inter-disciplinary teams will be necessary in caring for patients. (Anderson, 2015, 275)

Potential Influence of the Dochitect?

Can we perhaps learn something from this growing movement of Dochitect? This section would like to propose we can. In the most general of terms, Anderson is proposing a philosophy which takes usually siloed professions or identities and integrates them in a manner that allows different experiences to inform one another in order to bring a new perspective. While Anderson appears to be more focused on patient-care in her model of the Dochitect, she does, on occasionally, bring in concerns about how to improve the work life quality of doctors and working staff in these medical environments. 

By stressing a doctor who is an architect or an architect who is a doctor may be able to incorporate insights that will make medical spaces more accessible, the same framework lays out fertile ground in considering the overlapping relationship between a doctor who is a disabled individual or a disabled individual who is a doctor. A disabled doctor may be able to identify with his patients in ways an able-bodied doctor may not both emotionally but also in terms of access needs. In other words, Anderson's model inadvertently calls our attention to how such lived experiences are valuable and used for practical innovations. This is not all dissimiliar to how the strongest proponents of Universal Design are disabled architects themselves.

Disabled doctors have the potential to the most influential advocates for the implementation of Universal Design in hospital and other healthcare facility architecture. In an article for The New York Times titled, "Doctors with Disabilities: Why They're Important" from 2017, Dr. Gregory Snyder was quoted saying, "I’m a guy in a wheelchair sitting right next to my patients. They know I’ve been in that bed just like they have. And I think that means something.” Indeed, it does mean something: it carries the gift as well as burden of lived experience. This lived experience (of disabled doctors) should be listened to, and capitalized on.

References:

Anderson, D. (2015). Drafting Meets Doctoring An Architect’s View of Health Design as Resident Physician. Proceedings of 33rd International Public Health Seminar. 263-276.

Jackson, K. (2020, March 2). How Architect Turned Doctor Designs for Healing. Azure Magazine. Retrieved April 29, 2022 from https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/how-this-architect-turned-doctor-designs-for-healing/.

Khullar, D. (2017, July 11). Doctors with disabilities: Why they're important. The New York Times. Retrieved May 1, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/upshot/doctors-with-disabilities-why-theyre-important.html. 

Twombley, R. (ed.) (1964). Medicine in the Year 2000. Louis Kahn: Essential Texts. New York, NY: WW Northon & Co.