Allied Health, Surgical Technology and Pharmacy Technology Labs at Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High SchoolX
Tracy Turnblad, from John Water’s comic film Hairspray, attended Mervo High, as it is locally known. The school historic role in the Civil Rights movement and the Brown v Board of Ed decision is part of the school’s history. Mervo has provided career training since its inception, but the old vocational spaces of wood shops and auto body shops original to the school’s design are largely outdated both as facilities and as careers. Full of broken, obsolete machinery and mechanical systems designed for industrial use, the old machine shop rooms at Mervo have found a new life as the incubator of new vocational careers in the Health Sciences.
The medical technology program was developed as a partnership between the Office of Career Technology Education for Baltimore City Public Schools and Good Samaritan Hospital, the industry partner for the school. Good Samaritan will help train and recruit graduates of the three technology programs that will occupy the space: Medical, Surgical, and Pharmacy. The spaces were designed to provide a simulated environment with actual medical equipment for training purposes, providing the opportunity to inner city kids to perform tasks critical to obtaining certification in medical technology such as sterilization of equipment, insertion of iv’s and other medical procedures. The space is designed to allow for outside partners to utilize the space in the evenings for community health clinics, training and other outreach programs.
The high-volumed, large open spaces and ribbon windows of the former machine shop, atypical of medical lab environments, were maintained as a bright, voluminous circulation core linking all program functions. Rather than breaking the space into individual classrooms, full glass storefront systems create multi layered visual connections from lab to lab and from corridor to lab. The original end-grain wood block floors were retained wherever possible. The spaces are connected by a continuous graphic “lifeline” symbolizing the significance and interrelatedness of medical technologies.
