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Stairs inside GW's Milken Institute School of Public Health are a central feature of the building, meant to attract visitors to walk up the steps and get more activity. Elevators have a less central location.Joanne Lawton

You won’t find any stairwells tucked away into the dark corners of George Washington University’s newest academic building.

That’s because those stairs have literally taken center stage in the $75 million Milken Institute School of Public Health — designed by Boston-based Payette Architects and D.C.-based Ayers Saint Gross Architects — where officials are celebrating an official grand opening Thursday. By design, one of the first things visitors see upon entering the 115,000 square-foot building are the staircases winding every which way up a seven-story atrium.

At the same time, the elevators require a little searching to find.

“I think it's important the environment where people are working is conducive to activity, that the environment helps people make the right choices,” said the school’s dean, Lynn Goldman. “When the stairwell is a pleasant place and exciting place to be it helps people decide to use the stairs. When the foods that are available in meetings or vending machines or cafeterias are healthier it helps make people make healthier choices about food.”

In other words, the School of Public Health was trying to put its money where it’s mouth is, Goldman said.

“At every step of the way to not only emphasize to people that they should eat the right food, obviously, but also to make it easy for them to make that healthier choice. The two things go together," she said.

To engineer health into the building, officials got creative. They decided to put one-third fewer copier and printer machines in their new building to force faculty and students to have to get up and walk every time they hit the print button. “The first week, people were really complaining about it, but we really wanted them to think twice about how much they were printing,” Goldman said....Continue Reading

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