FACULTY PROFILE
Victor Dadras Victor Dadras is a long-time NYSID faculty member and the coordinator of the MPS Healthcare Interior Design program. He is also a partner at Dadras Architects, an architecture, interior design, and urban design consulting firm in New York City that works on commercial, residential, and healthcare facilities.
The MPS Healthcare Interior Design program is brand-new. How did it get its start? For most of the 21 years I’ve been at NYSID, I’ve been teaching Contract Design III—a fourth-year undergraduate design studio that focuses on healthcare design. It’s been a very successful class and rewarding to introduce students to this important, fast-growing specialty area. Even from just this one course, a few of my students have gone on to successful careers in healthcare design, working at big firms like HOK, Perkins + Will, and Perkins Eastman. It was clear that there was potential to grow the healthcare design curriculum, so the College, under Dean Ellen Fisher’s leadership, decided to embark on creating the program. We worked with some of the leaders in the field—like Tama Duffy Day and Mike Puksta, Design Principals at Perkins + Will and Cannon Design respectively—to help develop the initial curriculum. Why do you think it’s important to have this program? This is really the first program of its kind. There’s nothing else exactly like it. We were hearing from firms in the healthcare design profession that students just don’t have the specialized skills they need—like an understanding of evidence-based design, medical planning, and programming for healthcare interiors. These days you really need to have specific and professional credentials. I really think graduates of this program, who will be much more educated and experienced in these specialties, will be more marketable. I recently went to a healthcare design conference and everyone I met was so excited about our program because no other schools are offering it. There are some architecture schools that have a concentration on healthcare, but it’s quite different to focus solely on interior design. It’s very exciting to be at the forefront of healthcare interior design education. What’s your role as program coordinator? It means that I am working on everything from recruiting the faculty to developing the curriculum. The experts in this field are spread all around the world, so it can be tricky. But we’ll work with their schedules to ensure they can contribute to the program. I also work with healthcare industry professionals and even local hospitals to tap into their hands-on experience and research. In addition to that, I teach the Survey of Healthcare Environments course in the program.
72 New York School of Interior Design