The HCD 10: Angela Mazzi, Architect – HCD Magazine

Angela Mazzi has dedicated much of her nearly 20-year career to elevating the application of research in design, specifically in the healthcare design sector. Her peer-reviewed salutogenesis research demonstrates how health outcomes can be impacted by reducing stress and promoting well-being, leading to her becoming a sought-after expert in the design of oncology, behavioral health, and emergency departments as well as clinical workspaces.

Specifically, Mazzi’s research on milieu, the collection of therapeutic settings in mental health environments that foster social interactions and activity, is reframing the approach to these care environments by supporting a new model of programming to reduce patient aggression, shorten inpatient stays, and increase staff retention.

In the last year, her ideas have helped guide the planning and design of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center’s new 160,000-square-foot behavioral health facility, scheduled to open in late 2023. There, she’s worked with the client to embrace a facility design that conveys a sense of empowerment and safety, accommodates parental participation, and provides a variety of spaces to accommodate both introverts and extroverts.

This past February, she drew on her expertise in oncology space planning and design to co-create GBBN’s Oncology Symposium. The virtual, multidisciplinary event brought together experts from healthcare organizations across the country, including TriHealth, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and Bon Secours Mercy Health, to discuss market challenges and oncology trends.

Outside the office, her schedule is just as full. In 2021, as president of the American College of Healthcare Architects (ACHA), Mazzi formed a multidisciplinary task force to study equity and efficacy in healthcare and relaunched the ACHA Masters Series, panel discussions around trends in healthcare. As president-elect of AIA Cincinnati this year, she’s leading a group to consider how architecture supports well-being for patients, visitors, and staff. She also regularly shares her work at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. As her nomination reads, “For Angela, architecture is an advocacy profession.”