Corridors Through Working Spaces

If a question is raised:"What is corridor function in a working space environment ?"

Maybe, most common answer is space where circulation of a person and/or a group of persons from a place to another different place could be easily and safely enabled. Most probably this flow of circulation not merely involving a person but also including particular good that a person carry along with. 

An easy circulation movement could be associated with comfortable movement when a person or two persons (or maybe more than two persons) are passing this corridor without distracting each other.

Corridor should be well planned based on health and safety requlations. In case of emergency situations, corridor shall provide safe route of esape that enabling large number of people could be evacuated as quickly and safely as possible.

Corridor in an office environment is also closely related with how people are interacting and interfacing between each other based on particular working organizational structure and culture. Not merely interaction between a person to other person, maybe it also related with interaction between a person with a particular equipment.

Good corridor scheme in an office environment could help to provide better relationship between employee behavior and job satisfaction. Good corridor scheme as an integral part of an working environment, can also encourage working productivity.

Corridor should not appear as just a long boring space that separating a room to another room and/or separating one enclosed room to another open working space. It could be visually appear in more interesting appearances. 

By the using of particular treatment on a corridor wall for example, we can use this wall feature as visual sign to identify and differentiate a particular space zone in a large open space, to avoid an employee losing his or their spatial orientation.

We can also can explore different treatment on corridor to differentiate one office department to another office department. And it also commonly found that specific treatment to corridor as part of executive area to be differentiate to other corridor at general office area.

Specific interior treatment in corridor could be achieved by the using specific material on its floor, wall and ceiling. Specific lighting treatment is also have an important role to define specific function of a corridor.

Sometime, corridor shall provide a certain level of visual privacy. In this case, level of illumination and placement of lighting fixtures are become very critical. Maybe, lighting treatment should be provided in such a way to make somebodys face not directly received lighting hotspot. 

Acoustical consideration is also important. Long corridor should not provided within hard flooring materials since it will make disturbing noise that might be potentially come from somebody walking on their shoes.

A Tropical Garden Lobby for Residential Towers

Lobby spaces are actually provided to serve apartment towers which are situated in down town area. Basically, lobby space is a long and shallow depth space within a row of big structural columns are placed adjacent to lift core wall.Prominent exterior landscaping then becoming anchor element which is to be strongly associated as intergrated part within the lobby spaces. 

There are window displays in random composition along lobby backdrop wall. These window displays are belong to retail outlet that are situated behind the lobby hall. This is a spatial effort to make shallow space at lobby become slightly enlarged by creating some visual transparencies to another neighborhood spaces.

Based on this concept, internal lobby spaces is simply generated in natural design scheme. Natural design approach that is wrapped in a simply modern urban looks. It strongly reflected in the selection of modern wooden furnitures and the using of natural wooden slats as a dominant floating element on ceiling and lift lobby wall. This design statement is also elaborated by the using of vertical floating wooden slats as sun screen in associated with full-height glass window openings.

Lift lobby interior is heavily treated with vertical natural wooden slats through-out wall surfaces. This heavy statement suddenly cut-off by the existence of huge opening that provide releaving view of heavy landscaped courtyard ouside. 

There are dedicated lobby for each apartment towers, and each lobby are connected with covered semi-open gallery. that is accessible from centralized car drop-off area. Design approach is retained as similar as implemented in dedicated lobby areas, but appear in better in spatial order, in a single long linear free-columns space. The overall modern natural ambience create a relaxing and relieving transition space for lounging and viewing.

HOSPITAL WARD ROOM

Hospital ward room is simply defined as enclosed spaces in a health facility building where patient receive particular medical treatments. Nowadays, hospital ward room is provided not just as utilitarian rooms which are furnished with standard bed within round metal legs, simple bedside table within drawer and simple neon box lamp at ceiling. Further following the raising of quality of life, there are more patients require hospital ward room within certain higher levels of comfort where they have a restful healing treatment.

Definitely, hospital ward room shall provide adequate privacy in related with their medical healing and treatment. Patient shall feel quiet for rest and sleep on their bed. Ward room shall also provide higher standard of clinical governance and effective infection controls.

Patient shall have safe access to an enclosed bathroom in private and having their own visitors without disturbing others (if there are another patent in a ward room). It will be ideal if patient have opportunity control his or her own environment, such as levels of noises, lighting (artificial or natural or combination between these two) and also levels of room temperature if the ward room is equipped with air conditioning system. A safe and accessible storage of personal belongings should also be well addressed. 

Hospital ward room size is generated by the bed size and required clearance space around bed, enclosed bathroom (consisting shower cubicle, WC and hand basin table), space for clinical workstation, storage and overnight stay facility. Space for patient mobile bed shall include its maneuver space when patient on bed need to be transferred in and out of the ward room.

Clearance space for patient bed commonly defined by the using of ceiling track-mounted curtain that provided for privacy purposes when medical team require medical examinations to patient bed. Privacy curtain is also utilized to enable visual privacy when two or more patients are stay in a single ward room suite. In related with the using of this privacy curtain, particularly inn air-conditioned ward room, it should be carefully selected and installed. Correct type of curtain system will not block fresh air and return air distributions from and to A/C grilles. 

 Once patient bed position is determined, all associated electrical and service outlets position can be further ensured accordingly. Typically, all of these outlets are integrated on a linear wall-mounted bed service panel unit that installed on wall above patient head position. There are various type of outlets are commonly place on overhead bed service panel such as power outlets, light switches, nurse call button, medical gasses (suction, oxygen, etc) outlets, intercom outlets, etc). Built-in task light and ambient night light also commonly integrated on this bed service panel.

Since the patient bed is mobile type, a kind of bumper should be properly mounted on wall and/or floor. This will avoid and reduce bed impact movements during patient transferring activities.

Selection of material is important aspect in hospital ward room design. Generally, selected material should be durable and easy to be maintained. All selected materials shall comply with local regulation in related with safety and health requirements. Material and its installation details shall not causing undesirable dirt and dust are collected. 

Some research claimed that colors can promote healing functions and positive atmosphere for both patient and medical staff in a hospital. They claimed that there are several factors have been identified that can measurably improve positive results for patients and medical hospital staff :  reduce or eliminate environmental stressors, provide positive distractions, enable social support and give a sense of control. Further, the research claimed that interior designs that reflect nature can play an important role in meeting with these objectives. The us of color palettes that reflect nature, can help promote a healing atmosphere in hospital environments and at the same time also promote relaxing, therapeutic environment, which can encourage a positive impact to patient health,

Interior Design for Children's and Women's Hospital

This Children's and Women's Hospital is a five levels hospital building in the center of busy town which is surrounding by prime housing area, business center, education facilities, malls and other small-medium retail outlets. Outpatient Area is situated at the ground floor where hospital emergency unit, pharmacy outlet and retail spaces are also provided. Wards are situated on the rest of the upper floors including operating rooms and intensive care unit facilities.

Simple and clean shapes design are become main intention that need to be carefully integrated within health and safety aspects. Corporate color become useful aspect to create distinctive visual accents almost to the whole of internal spaces, particularly at hospital's public areas. Almost all of material and color selections are determined with neutral and natural colors to highlight this corporate color properly.

 Medical examination rooms are situated at the ground floor level including pediatric clinics and obstetrics-gynecology clinics. Design challenges is raised where comfort working spaces for medical doctors at one side and pleasant space for women and children patient at other side should be well-combined. This the room where a medical doctor can probably meet with hundred of patients in a day. And this room become a pleasant space for a mother who will preparing childbirth.

Wards is carefully furnished where good quality hospital ward furnishing is combined with other functional fixtures and equipments such as wall service panels which are typically installed at headboard side of the patient bed. Simple wardrobe, long sofa and wall-mounted or ceiling-mounted TV are typically provided in single bed wardrobe.

Reception Area for Corporate Office

How big should a Corporate Office's Reception Area be? It depends on many considerations. When the premise is situated in a tenancy building in a main business area, it need to be well-considered that a reception space should effectively well-planned. The case will be different if reception area is a part of an office inside their own building at suburban area. Maybe we can have a design opportunity to have generous reception spaces.

Functionally, detailed size of a reception area for a corporate office could be determined by circulation flows involving employees and visitors. There is an example of an office reception without any waiting sofas are provided. This is happened because corporate policy require corporate visitors shall have official appointment, and when visitor arrive, an officer will directly ask the visitor to come and sit into a meeting room inside the office area.

Reception space size could also be determined by its arrangement involving another surrounding rooms with different functions. There is another example where reception area is implemented as a big and spacious space, because reception area is also used as a pre-function area belong to a row of meeting rooms that are situated directly facing to reception area.

In security point of view, reception is an area that separates public area and authorized employee area. Normally, there is an electronic access card is provided somewhere adjacent to an access door, where an authorized employee can entering their workspace.

There are many interesting design challenges when a reception space is initially generated in a planning and design stage. Creative design approaches can be generated and explored based on what we can find from the corporate itself in related with specific corporate culture and corporate identity. 

This will become important factor to determine why an appearance for an office for a corporate is different against another office belong to another corporate. Definitely, appearance for a Financial Office will be different against an Advertising Company Office and space atmosphere for a Petroleum Company will also different against a IT Company.

A Fun In a Gathering Space

This is just about a small multi-purposes space which is situated in a corporate office in an office tenancy building. The place is a space for all office members and their visitors can make various type of meeting and gathering such as corporate meeting, lunch gathering, product launching, brainstorming session, marketing presentation, small exhibition and press conference.

Design idea is just generated freely, combining and exploring many various design elements that consist of kind of shapes and colors. This is based on the function of the room that is actually the space for everybody, everybody with many different personalities and ideas. The space that can release everybody from day-to-day formal office activities.

This is just about 100 square meters space belong to a corporate office that is divided into 2 different split floor levels. Upper floor level is treated with elevated dark floor deck and the lower level is treated with white marble floor. In general, color scheme is generated from a split-complementary color composition where vivid red color is freely combined with yellow color and dark wood color. Meanwhile the white and grey color to remaining elements are exploited to elaborate this split-complementary color scheme. Ceiling is exposed as high as possible and the feeling of living in a bigger space is created than actually existed. Some mirror wall panels are applied to elaborate this design intention.

Seating arrangement is provided to accommodate various type of activities may happen in the room. Some loose chairs are provided in the middle of the space to offer flexibility. Fixed sofa arrangement is provided along perimeter window to provide nice seating option with better comfort. And a row of high chairs are provided adjacent to bar counter in the corner of the room for an informal seating option.

Black-Grey-White Color Scheme for a Working Space Environment

 It seem the black, grey and white color are things that will producing something boring, dull, faceless and characterless. But actually in a three dimensional space composition, this black-grey-white color scheme doesn't have to mean boring. It depend how it combined with other elements of space such as shape of space, lighting, transparency and texture of materials.

Black, grey and white color composition could be nicely elaborated as a minimalist expression to to define an interior space. Pictures are shown here maybe examples of how this color composition is well applied in an office space environment. A simple modern look is obviously elaborated particularly in its integration with various materials such as brushed stainless steel, glass and illuminated surfaces. This is an example how a big impact in an interior space could be created by a minimalist scheme that is simply generated from the black-grey-white colors.