Planned Parenthood Visiting Experience

Location: Queens, NY
Type: Proposal

This project was completed independently in a graduate studio at Columbia University.

What if the waiting experience creates the architecture?

This project is about getting people through.

As Planned Parenthood is expanding into Queens to serve the greater New York community the problem of creating an environment for the service of a large audience is to create a place where a large number of people can be served with minimal difficulty, in some sense. However, efficiency only partially alleviates the issue. This project also hopes to embrace inefficiency by creating an intervention on waiting, which is actually the bulk of the Planned Parenthood experience. This experience is amplified in the unique environment of a Planned Parenthood, where politics and security overlap in this flow. As such, this project is a collection of micro-interventions on flow taking this unique context as an engine.

Process/Ideation

The process of designing the space took diverging paths. First, I researched the infrastructure of waiting, first cataloguing different elements then creating chemistry with the different elements. Similarly, I sought to focus on the experience of the patient by studying the patient-centric experience. What is typical experience of the patient entail? By breaking down the entire experience into increments it became clear that the bulk of the experience is waiting. By pairing different waiting elements with the new building blocks for furniture/built-ins/storage different moments were created in a linear Planned Parenthood experience. This became measured against the different safety/security/surveillance needs of the program to unravel a visitor plan.