In 2018 Page in conjunction with architecture+ authored a Master Plan that described a concept to replace the Austin State Hospital (ASH) and commercially develop portions of the hospital campus. The master plan serves to codify the mission statement and goals for a comprehensive State of Texas Brain Health System supported by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), University of Texas Dell Medical School (UTDMS), and the Austin State Hospital (ASH). These guiding principles include providing safe, therapeutic, welcoming, and normative environments for people receiving care, as well as a safe and engaging environment for staff that contributes to reducing the stigma associated with mental illness and allows people to receive treatment with dignity.

A new replacement hospital will consolidate services into one key building to improve operational efficiency and form a more public and dignified presence of the hospital in the urban neighborhood. The team identified research-based, best-practice principles in order to develop the space programming and physical modeling used to establish the master plan. This means implementing biophilic practices, choosing people-centered care as opposed to control-focused care, and creating a healing space while adopting the needed safety and security factors to drastically improve the quality of life, patient outcomes and staff productivity. Partnerships with community providers will be sought to fill in service line gaps and provide the appropriate level of care in the right place. This vision also extends to the philosophy of the campus as a whole. Rather than a traditional state facility that is inwardly focused with a hard perimeter, the new Master Plan is more permeable to allow the campus to be knit into the fabric of the surrounding neighborhood. Shared amenities and recreation spaces are planned along the perimeter. This approach will communicate a change in mentality about Brain health, reinforcing that it truly affects us all. These trends have led to the idea of creating brain health facilities that resemble communities rather than institutions. They are a collection of spaces that replicate a real-life environment in which people will live after treatment, making the inside represent the community outside. Design centered around these communities helps to promote interaction among patients, staff, visitors, and family members, keeping individual wards from becoming isolated. Fewer places of confinement and more places of treatment and preparation for return to the outside world is imperative. The new hospital, also designed by the Page/architecture+ team, is organized in a House-Neighborhood-Downtown model for brain health facilities with the creation of smaller cluster-based inpatient treatment settings within larger inpatient units. In this model the “house” refers to the inpatient bed, the “neighborhood” to the unit of typically 24 inpatient beds, and the “downtown” to the shared services and amenities for all units in the facility. The master plan also addresses the entire care continuum, providing a long-term vision for the build-out of the campus to create the full continuum of services necessary for the future of brain health in Austin and the surrounding served communities.