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P R O F I L E
Opportunity builder: Erik Andersen Senior principal at Lamar Johnson Collaborative (Chicago, IL), a full-service design and architecture firm committed to enhancing the quality of the human experience.
By LIISA ANDREASSEN Correspondent
A ndersen and LJC are collectively committed to working to enhance the quality of the human experience and to improving how design and architecture can impact each individual’s emotional being. Individually, Anderson has led design efforts on transformational projects for prominent academic medical centers and large healthcare systems across the U.S. and internationally since 1989. “As architects, we need to think of our clients as partners and build relationships that go beyond singular projects,” Anderson says. “Trust is earned when a relationship is built on sharing knowledge, experience, and design thinking that allows a client to succeed.” A CONVERSATIONWITH ERIK ANDERSEN. The Zweig Letter: I see that you have a great deal of experience in designing educational healthcare facilities. Can you tell me about one that your firmworked on recently that really made you excited and share why?
Erik Andersen: The LJC designed a 190,000-square-foot Recreation and Student Center for the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis, which stands out to me as an exceptional example of a healthcare educational project integrating multiple synergistic programs into a single facility. The project seamlessly fused a wide range of uses, while honoring the critical divisions between quiet study and active collaboration, restful sleep and athletic activity. The project has become the new gateway and center for student activity for this university’s urban campus located in a growing academic medical center. The vibrant, walkable and transit-oriented CWE neighborhood supports the student-oriented building as a model of identity for the campus. A hub of collaborative spaces connected by a vertical landscape of themed stairs integrates diverse programs at the corner in an expression of visible activity. I believe the RAS Center represents a future vision of education in which “program fusion projects” create interdisciplinary and multi-activity environments that attract and retain students and faculty and create vibrant educational communities.
THE ZWEIG LETTER FEBR
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