Northstar Dermatology | 2022

Location: North Richland Hills, Texas, USA
Architects: AN.ONYMOUS
Lead Architects: Iman Ansari and Marta Nowak
Architect of Record: Guide Architecture LLC.
Design Development: Spinagu
Landscape Architect: Belle Firma
General Contractor: Z Constructors
Client: Northstar Dermatology
Photographers: Leonid Furmansky

Northstar Medical Campus is a 24,000 square-feet medical office development located in North Richland Hills, Texas. The three-acre campus comprises of three single-story medical office buildings arranged around a public plaza, as well as landscaped grounds around the buildings. ‘Building 2’ was completed in January 2022. ‘Building 1’ and ‘Building 3’, are scheduled to be completed by 2023.

The primary building on the site, Building 2, “Northstar Dermatology,” is a 9,000 square-feet office building that was completed in January 2022. The plan divides the office into two halves with the clinical zone on either sides, connected by the staff areas in the middle. The concentric arrangement of the clinical zones register the administrative hierarchy by defining the circulation patterns and a system of visual communication and surveillance between doctors, nurses and patients: the doctors’ offices at the very center overlooking the nurse stations, and the nurse stations facing the patient examination rooms on the peripheries.

The floor plan was developed through a series of agent-based computer simulations (using Pedestrian Dynamics and AnyLogic software) in order to synchronize the circulation with the schedule and pattern of activities, maximize efficiency and minimize unwanted obstructions or interactions.

The interior finishes and flooring mark and distinguish the public (patients) spaces from the private (staff) areas, at times exposing the mismatch between the original diagram and the final layout. The project’s commitment to sustainability is underscored by its innovative use of agent-based computer simulations to optimize circulation efficiency within the buildings. This approach significantly reduces energy consumption and environmental impact by streamlining movement patterns, thereby minimizing the need for extensive heating, cooling, and lighting in less frequented areas, and contributing to the overall ecological efficiency of the building.

The facades, considered merely as a form of orthographic representation, are black and white oblique drawings of the buildings themselves, using control joints as lines, the brick-veneer walls as surfaces, and the “shadow” EIFS areas as openings or cut-outs. The thin brick system, used with varied stacked and running bond patterns in horizontal and diagonal arrangements, conform to the drawn projections on the facades, while exposing the symbolic quality of the material as a non-brick—a tiling system that only signifies brick. In this way, the exterior facades function as two-dimensional surfaces wrapped around building shells that attempt to represent, but never fully correspond to, the logic of the interior. In doing so, the project aims to reveal the disjunction between the interior and the exterior, the structure and the skin.