Arup at our 'Making of the Modern City' November forum

Arup has been working on a new campus master plan for Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust

We are delighted that Dan Ringelstein, Director of Master Planning and Urban Design - Cities, will be joining our November infrastructure forum at the offices of law firm, DLA Piper, in the City of London.

Dan will be describing his work over the past year on the 10 to 20 Year Vision Plan for Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. He will also be bringing insights to the forum from his master-planning work for the healthcare system in the US. Dan will be part of our healthcare and life sciences infrastructure discussion panel with King's College London's Head of Real Estate Development Peter Ward, Zachary Gauge of UBS Asset Management, Andrew Hudson of JLL, and Ed Hayden of Scott Brownrigg.

Previous to joining Arup, Dan worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) as Director of Urban Design and Planning and Architecte/Urbaniste in France.

Dan has a BS in Architectural Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has attended Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He talked to Future Cities Forum ahead of the event, giving an overview of how Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Trust is working to create more a more flexible hospital campus, so that medical staff can react quickly to emerging health scenarios such as pandemics, but also improve patient care around chronic diseases. He also explained how important it is to value and restore the Victorian architecture of the original hospital, in order to attract foreign investment and to ensure place is carefully attended to, to create attractive areas outside for wellbeing.

Arup's recent life sciences and healthcare-related projects include the new Francis Crick Institute. The ambition was to create a world-leading centre of biomedical research and innovation in the heart of London. Named the Francis Crick Institute in honour of the great British scientist who discovered the DNA double helix structure, Arup described how the construction process:

It stated:

'The central London location meant we had to work fast. Speed is of the essence when you’re planning an 85,000m2 building in central London. Before construction on the shell of the building started in June 2011, we developed a procurement route that shortened the time on site by identifying and evaluating the client’s critical success factors against the design. We looked at every possibility to find the best solution. Our findings gave us a solution that meant basement construction could start ahead of the original programme. It was welcome news that then threw another complexity into the mix: the basement was where the highly sensitive equipment – including five nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers – had to be located to prevent vibrational interference.'