How do you – sitting in Houston – design a new hospital for rural Nigeria that will operate according to internationally recognized standards for medical and mental health care?
That was the challenge facing me when I answered Fr. John Ugobueze’s call for a volunteer AIA architect. I have helped major medical corporations, along with a team of other architects, in designing and overseeing the building of new hospitals in the United States and overseas. So I am no stranger to such tasks. Local building standards and building techniques differ from country to country, but the strict international standards of conceptualizing and designing a hospital places a high burden of responsibility on architects, engineers, and others responsible for creating the areas where the where physicians, nurses and hospital staff daily provide medical and mental health care for patients under their care.