Woodall’s design approach incorporates traditional desert urbanism and modern building materials to create contextually climatic responsive designs that incorporate nature to promote improved health and well-being for the benefit of all.

Sandra Woodall is a UK-qualified architect and urbanist who has lived in the Middle East for over 25 years, where she leads the award-winning MENA design studio for tangramGULF, a firm known for delivering diverse social infrastructure projects throughout the region with sustainability at the forefront.

Woodall’s design approach utilises traditional desert urbanism and building materials used in a contemporary manner, creating contextually climatic responsive designs which incorporate nature to promote improved health and wellbeing for the benefit of all. This was clearly demonstrated almost 20 years ago when tangram delivered the very first government building in Dubai to incorporate a green roof, reducing both the effects of the urban island effect and the buildings’ interior temperatures and thus the buildings’ energy demands.

The firm’s current projects include a cancer hospital for women and children in North Africa, where her designs for the healing environment are inspired by the surrounding forest and mountain landscapes. Last year, she founded tangramTERRA, an online platform to highlight sustainability casestudies from her work on a generation of regionally significant programmes, and to offer a resource centre for access to key regional and global agreements, guides, and toolkits, among other things, in support of her ongoing teaching roles. Resources on the pressing challenges of delivering a regional route to achieving the Gulf States’ decarbonisation targets as they address their commitments to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Woodall is developing a Hospital of the Future prototype with a visionary approach that challenges, rethinks, remodels, and redefines the healthcare system.

Currently, Woodall is working on a “Hospital of the Future” prototype with a visionary approach that challenges, rethinks, remodels and redefines health service delivery by peeling away the areas within the clinical setting that need not be in a costly, physically built space, and develops a radical reduction in carbon, energy, water, waste, and capital cost footprints to deliver a solution that becomes a “hospital without walls”.

A paradigm shift in response to global and pressing health, social, and environmental issues, which Woodall recently created through tangramMETA, an innovation and advanced technology group, and through which she is creating virtually extended and mixed reality spaces as an exponent of environmentally conscious sustainable design.

She believes that it is critical for today’s designers to be at the forefront of shaping what the Metaverse will look like for future generations. “It is critical that our clients recognise the value of virtual and mixed reality spaces designed to make their services available to everyone, bridging geographical, social, economic, technological, and generational divides. And that software evolves at the rate and in the direction that will assist designers in producing solutions that will allow this to become mainstream “she claims.