Hospital Design. Wormhole to healthy worlds.

Outstanding, visionary or playfully tried out hospital design. Mainly one approaches the topic with a list of the best ones. Like «The 30 Most Architecturally Impressive Hospitals in the World» (Online Masters in Public Health, 2014).

 

Left: Akershus University Hospital – Nordbyhagen, Norway and on the right:
Banner Gateway Medical Center – Gilbert, Arizona.

For me, the design perspectives are like a fly’s eye with its 3000 facets. An infinite number of feasibilities and visions, ideas and prototypes for hospitals. Meine Suche nach dem immer wieder möglichen unmöglichen brachte mich auf die Spur von E. Todd Wheeler. A leading health care architect between the ’50’s through ’70’s in the United States and author of the 298 pages book «Hospital Design and Function» (1964).

1967: E. Todd Wheeler’s Jetsonian plans for «Hospital of the Future» (Perkins+Will tweet November 20th 2014 – where Wheeler was a principal)

You know that you look at something visionary when your breath stops, your pulse goes faster, you need a tea or two to digest amazing ideas.
Thanks to Perkins+Will – an American architecture and design office from Chicago, which was founded in 1935 – Wheeler’s endless quest for answers to healthcare design’s most pressing questions continues. With the E. Todd Wheeler Healthcare Fellowship for emerging healthcare design and planning leaders.

Read more about this visionary designer in the Interview by Betty J. Blum (1983) with Wheeler via the Art Institute of Chicago at his home. And the hospital design is about books anyway. From yesterday to tomorrow.
 

Jeanne Kisacky (2017): Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870-1940
Julie Willis, Philip Goad, Cameron Logan (2018): Architecture and the Modern Hospital: Nosokomeion to Hygeia

My research has charged me so positively that I wanted to draw a few WOW hospitals myself – without an architecture CAD system (computer-aided design), preferably playfully. So I found the TWO POINT HOSPITAL game.

As shown in the screenshot, the hospital can be designed according to your wishes with focus on patients happiness. During the game, the hospital has to react to new illnesses with treatment options, train its staff, purchase new machines and find new treatments with research. Have a look at the 1minute Trailer here. Like a Design Thinking splinter.

In terms of breathtaking design we probably first touched and saw the top of the iceberg. Over the past 20 years, the health care sector has been developing its own supersonic drive; we will see impressive milestones in connection with digitalisation, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and augmented reality, to name but a few.

Hospital Design is the wormhole to new worlds.
Maurice Codourey