Outpatient Clinic Design Through Rule Based Design Methods

Abstract

Health is one of the basic needs of humanity. People use hospitals to control and treat their health. As the most advanced health structures, hospitals have been transformed with new requirements and systems throughout history. Health structure design contains various inputs, data, and criteria. This study reveals the network of relations with a rule-based design method to provide systematic design assistance for architects. Hospitals have complex structures in terms of the design solution and production management. Therefore, it will be useful to systematize these complex structures for design inputs to create a base for the architectural program. Within the framework of this study, rule-based design approaches were adopted for hospital polyclinics. Polyclinics work independently but are linked to the main hospital system. Today the main design problems in polyclinics are accessibility and visibility. The main purpose of this study is to create a model base for alternative plan types by taking advantage of the productive method: rules-based design. Firstly, to consider the functional relations and distances among multiple units for an optimum solution, the study evaluates the existing working designs and their derivatives. Secondly, it addresses the optimization of hospital polyclinic design in terms of obtaining the minimum route overlap, minimum walking distance, and high visibility of the patients in the polyclinics. Thirdly, due to the repetitive nature of polyclinic spaces, the space grammar method has been used as a rule-based approach for the derivation of spaces. The genetic algorithm method used together with the shape grammar is included in the study to process the formal and numerical data and to compare the original design alternatives. The spatial sequence technique of Space Syntax is used as an evaluation method. In the mixed method of this study, the relational information obtained from existing hospitals has been resolved. These relations have created design rules for an outpatient polyclinic architectural program by binary and triplet relations. Alternative productions with the genetic algorithm tools have been generated through the Rhino / Grasshopper software extension. The generated plans have been evaluated with the spatial sequence technique of Space Syntax theory to explore optimum solutions for distance and visibility.