The Respira Model: From Housing for Health: 2024 Breaking Through Competition Finalist

2024 Breaking Through Conceptual Design Competition

The 2024 Healthcare Design Conference + Expo in Indianapolis featured the fourth Breaking Through conceptual design competition, encouraging teams to reimagine healthcare design without constraints like regulations, codes, or budgets.

Four finalists—SmithGroup, HGA, Perkins&Will, and Gresham Smith—competed for a $10,000 grand prize.

The competition began earlier this year with teams submitting innovative solutions to anticipated future healthcare challenges. From 13 semifinalists, chosen by a jury of industry experts, four advanced to the final round. At the conference, each team had 10 minutes to present their visionary concepts live, with attendees voting in real time to determine the winner.

Here, Healthcare Design presents the 2024 finalist—Perkins&Will’s The Respira Model.

The Respira Model: 2024 Breaking Through Finalist

Team: Perkins&Will

On-stage presenters: Edoardo Cerpelloni, associate; Robert Clemens, principal; Mariana Giraldo, associate; Dreama Lin, designer III; Anica Radu, designer III

Access to quality housing is a challenge for many residents, including urban dwellers, who may experience a lack of nearby services and resources such as fresh food, playgrounds, and reliable transportation access. As major cities across the U.S. continue to face housing shortages without a long-term solution that addresses the health conditions of the existing building stock, the Respira Model proposes going beyond the basic required repairs to individual units and offers a holistic approach to the well-being of these traditionally underserved communities.

Image credit: Perkins&Will

The concept: The Respira Model is a modular system that acts like new “lungs” for high-density housing.
Using prefabricated panels, the system can form a range of shapes and sizes to support any type of lifestyle programming, transforming underutilized residential areas such as building rooftops into spaces that offer community-focused health services and lifestyle amenities. One of the many shapes the modules can take is a greenhouse, focused on creating economic opportunities for the community through fresh, local, healthy food. Other ideas include a safe play space and a community hub with a library and tech room for residents.

The details: The system’s easily deployable panels are quickly constructed on site from modular systems and then joined seamlessly by connecting nodules. Each Respira panel features six main components to regulate air quality, generate solar power, maximize daylight, harvest rainwater, and provide an integrated infrastructure that supports better services throughout the buildings and in the new landscapes between them. For example, a translucent photovoltaic layer on the panel provides clean energy to the unit and controls the transmission of natural daylight into the spaces below.

For more on Healthcare Design’s 2024 Breaking Through competition, read here.

Anne DiNardo is editor-in-chief of Healthcare Design. She can be reached at [email protected].