Our work at The Institute for Rehabilitation and Research (TIRR) in Houston, Texas has included numerous built projects, as well as master planning services. Our most recent planning effort involved the update to the Master Facility Plan (MFP) to address future growth options for this facility.
The MFP documents a process that is intended broadly to uncover the condition, quality and suitability of TIRR’s current facilities. It is an attempt to develop guidelines for future facility development, which optimizes growth and development of each hospital function. Studies were conducted to test for feasibility against existing properties of the physical building, user needs, cost, and time for implementation.
The original Master Plan provided a plan to replace the entire 102,000 square foot facility for this major physical rehabilitation institution in the Texas Medical Center. As TIRR began its initial master planning efforts, the outdated and inefficient existing facilities required unusually high maintenance.
With no possibility of additional land the existing site was then planned to accommodate a “pinwheel” of sequenced construction and demolition. Four construction phases accomplished the total replacement of the facility without interruption of patient care. With strict budgetary parameters, the design challenge was to create a patient tower and dietary department maximizing barrier-free mobility for disabled staff and patients. Synthesizing design intentions, the six-story, 102,000 square foot facility represents a unique concept in care for patients with limited accessibility.
The site and facility master plan outlined a renovation and expansion construction phasing sequence to allow TIRR to: maintain operations; develop a new on-site parking structure; new patient bed tower; new therapeutic garden; new atrium spine with indoor landscape garden connecting existing and new facilities; decentralization of rehabilitation therapy space on each inpatient nursing unit; and unique rehabilitation programming space, including indoor landscaping.
