Yale Inpatient Psychiatry
The Yale Psychiatric Hospital (originally the Yale Psychiatric Institute) was designed by Richard Meier and was completed in 1987. The building is spatially complex with many different materials. This project involved renovating 2 psychiatric units on the second floor that were suffering from cramped nursing program spaces. The program for this 6,700 s.f. project involved creating a centralized nursing unit to “bridge” both units. At the time of the renovation the new use involved combining a geriatric population with an adolescent population. While this was a very strange combination it seems to have worked and part of its success has been due to maintaining 2 independent day rooms for each population as well as 1 larger community room. The single nurse’s station also included a consolidation of all the other core functions; clean and soiled utility, conference room, storage, copy, unit secretary and staff toilet.