Tag Archive for: stewardship

Hands-On Healthcare Education

What makes a successful learning environment for training much-needed healthcare providers? Facilities geared toward experiential learning! Students today must learn differently while new information is being generate faster than ever before. Designers of healthcare teaching facilities are tasked with creating flexible, experiential learning environments to fulfill this need, and Schmidt Associates has worked with many […]

Getting Real About Value Engineering

“Value engineering” is perhaps the most overused and under-realized term in the design/construction industry today. It has become the catch bucket for any exercise that involves reducing costs. By definition, value is the ratio of function to cost. Value is increased by improving function or reducing cost. A great example: the benefit analysis of solar […]

Does Your School Really Need New Construction?

Schools serve as a fixture within their communities, stirring up nostalgic moments for past students. Like for the college student driving past their old elementary school on their way through town during their first break away from school, remembering those days on the playground during recess. Or for the parents of high school students, strolling through […]

Third in the Series of Four Core Principles of Design at Schmidt Associates – A Closer Look at the Stewardship Principle

Design at Schmidt Associates flows passionately and intentionally out of our Core Principles of Design. We covered the strategic principal in our previous post of the series. The second of these principles is Stewardship. Design solutions respond to this principle through their functional usability and the way in which people are able to flexibly activate their […]

Making Magic – Approaching Conceptual Design

Many people seem to think there is some sort of magic that happens when architects develop early project design concepts. It’s a big part of the fun; the first steps in connecting the client to their dreams. Not that it’s a simple exercise, but it actually involves many of the same replicable steps each time. […]

Elevate Your Expectations for Downtown Development, Part IV

In my Indianapolis Business Journal column listing 10 things Indianapolis could do to make our already thriving downtown an even better place to live, the fourth item was: Face up to the fact that urban dwellers may not have cars, which means we’ll need more forms of public transportation. Yes, the Indiana Pacers Bikeshare is […]

What Makes a Hotel Easily Accessible?

There are plenty of rules and guidelines when it comes to designing accessible spaces—but there are things that still do not make it EASY for people to use. When working with The Arc of Indiana to design their new Training Institute and Teaching Hotel, we had the opportunity to sit down with a group from […]

Sustainability: Indiana University Rotary Building

The Rotary building on the IUPUI Campus in Indianapolis was originally constructed in 1931 as a home for orphaned and ill children. It was later turned over to IU for academic and administrative purposes.  The facility is one of the few remaining historic structures on the IUPUI campus. Its location offers the building as a […]

How to "Right Size" Your School

Has your school or district experienced influxes or decreases in student population due to shifting enrollment patterns or unanticipated variables that impacted your demographic projections? Having too few (or too many) students in a building affects space utilization, staffing, and operating costs. Typically, the capacity of a school is determined by the number of classrooms […]

Patience is a Virtue – A New Academic Facility for Ivy Tech Anderson

Ivy Tech Anderson has a defined mission to accommodate unprecedented growth over the past decade. As such, they were committed to constructing a new building to provide much needed academic space to continue the commitment to change lives in Indiana through education and workforce development.  This building will provide additional academic space for the Anderson […]