Architektura ZdrowiaHealth and Architecture Hospital and health care architecture emerge at various moments of history as elemental, rights-based, and essential. Poland has a story to tell. But not the one you might think.
In my recent publication Forensic Architecture, I looked at how a team of investigators, led by architects, investigate state and corporate violence around the globe employing techniques in spatial analysis and digital modelling to reconstruct incidents of human rights violations. Here I want to introduce another manifestation of architectural practice; an idea, to be utterly honest, I encountered in a conscious way, only a year ago. It’s not so much about the aesthetics of resistance as the aesthetics of values, which is related of course.
Health Architecture is the study and promotion of the discipline of architecture pertaining to all aspects of intervening, caring, and promoting human health and wellbeing. This is why I wrote that my conscious encounter was only last year! As my unconscious, or rather noncritical, encounter with the architecture of health care has been, as for all of us, lifelong.
While born ‘at home’ I have made regular use of hospitals, care centres, dentists, schools, physiotherapy centres just as many of us have done throughout life . Family have passed their final years in care homes and final days in hospices. According to Michael P Murphy, historians and theoreticians of architecture generally ignore the hospital as a type or relegate it to a ‘sub-vector’ of consideration. Hospitals and care facilities have often been categorised as too functional. Their functional requirements are so demanding that elegant architectural resolutions are inevitably compromised to the point of extinction.1
However, if we think about architecture through its purpose instead of its style, the hospital, and indeed health and care facilities in general, emerge as paradigmatic. A history of the architecture of health becomes a way to unlock the intractable human and social laws that architecture serves in our lives. In fact, when we ask about health architecture, we are not just talking about buildings designed as medical facilities but architecture as a means to health.
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