Three Men and a White Board

What do you get when you put a doctor, an engineer and a cheap techie Scotchman in a room for three hours? Why, you get the floor plan for a clinic on the Burmese/Indian border, of course! Ray Comeau of Medical Mercy Canada is a Red

 Deer doctor who has been leading a group of volunteers to India for the last five years to provide medical assistance to the locals. Pat Romerman is a Principal with Group2 Architecture Engineering who volunteers with A Better World. I am the cheap Scotchman.

At Olds College, I teach a course on farm building planning, and I use a great floor planning process I learned from an agricultural engineer, Sandy Roberts, 15 years ago. Basically there are four steps:

1. List the needs and wants for the building
2. Determine minimum sizes for each room or area
3. Organize the rooms for optimum internal and external traffic flow
4. Determine the overall size and shape of the building.
   

Last year Ray and I went through this process and developed the Cadillac of clinics. Ray took the plan to India to price it out and found that we couldn't afford it. He brought back a plan that was designed locally. The foundation looked like my lower intestine--no shortage of outside walls, and the roof lines looked like something from Architectural Digest but would make adding on to the building later difficult—so it was back to the drawing board, or in this case, the white board.

Ray and Pat started listing and sketching on the white board (Pat had to sketch on a white board because he only had a Macbook with him. It looked very stylish, but, of course, couldn't do any real work), and I opened AutoCAD to start drawing up their ideas with precise dimensions. When we had all the basic components of the building sized, we hooked up my laptop to a big screen to organize the rooms.

The great thing about a CAD program is the ease with which you can move and edit. On paper, you need to redraw each time you want to make a change, but, with CAD, you can move rooms around like puzzle pieces—and that is what we did. After the rooms were organized to optimize traffic flow, the overall size and shape of the building was decided upon. It is at this point that you often create some extra space and can fit in some of those "wants" from your original list. Things like storage closets and extra office space magically appear. And, for this building which, we suspect, will later have a phase 2 and a phase 3, we made sure our plan paved the way for those wings to save headaches in the years to come.

The advantage of collaboration becomes so apparent during sessions like these. I know the product of this design charrette will be much better than any of us could have formulated individually. (For starters, Pat would have to get a work computer! But I have to say Pat, your pictures look really good on that Macbook!) And this is just the first step in getting this clinic up and running. There are many more steps to follow, but remember: proper planning promotes productive projects!

I really enjoyed working with Ray and Pat—even if I had to skip my Christmas party to be there. Thanks guys!

If you would like more information on this project, go to http://www.a-better-world.ca/ and read the feature article on the Comeaus.