BC Children’s built the new 640,000 square feet Teck Acute Care Center on the BC Children’s Hospital site in Vancouver. It is the only children’s hospital in the Canadian province of British Columbia, and serves one million children annually.
The project sought to enrich the healing environment by adding artwork and technology that would be positive distractions for patients and families.
Aesthetics was hired to design an arts enhancement program that had three separate components; Partnership with local museum and art institutions, a visual arts program that featured local and First Nations artists, and a graphic design program reinforcing the wayfinding themes and creating a more hospitable environment for the families, patients and staff.
The Children’s Healing Experience Project is governed by a committee made up of health authority, builder, patient families and senior level volunteers. The vision was to create a unique pediatric healing environment, drawing on resources throughout Canada. The Committee’s hope was to involve organizations and artists that can help provide a range of experiences that speak to children.
Aesthetics reached out to six museum partners to help design an area of the hospital using their content, expertise and staff resources. This has become a tremendous symbiotic relationship between the hospital and the cultural community, resulting in six floors of dynamic murals, bringing both fun engagement and education to children about the history, culture, art and science of the region.
Aesthetics assisted the arts committee in creating mission and strategic guidelines for the project and leading them through a process to identify artists, selections and installations. In addition, Aesthetics did a nationwide Call for Artists that resulted in 600 artist entries, and the creation of over 100 unique murals, and individual commissions of artists working in all media. This project had a very tight timeline and was completed in 18 months.
