In 2020..

In the words of Dr. Paul Farmer, a renowned medical anthropologist and clinician, “buildings are making people sicker”. (Murphy, 2016).

In 2050...

A group of architects, clinicians, healthcare workers, mental health advocates, and citizen scientists pioneered a new approach towards the built environment through coming together and grappling with these fundamental question:

• What would it look like if buildings across the world no longer hindered but rather promoted health?
• What would it look like if architecture helped develop cognitive capacities across the lifespan?
• What would it look like if the built environment were designed to be truly accessible and inclusive?
• What would it look like if our homes responded in real-time to our emotional states and needs?
• What would it look like if the home became the new center of healthcare?

Examining these questions helped usher in a new era of design: architecture designed to support and promote physical, mental and emotional health.

TLDR;

<aside> 🏡 Homes become the new center of healthcare. Further, the built environment is constructed to replicate and interact symbiotically with nature, promoting physical and psychological health and wellbeing.

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A brief history of hospital design

The rise of office-like hospital architecture:

After the Second World War, hospitals underwent an architectural shift aimed to ‘normalize’ the hospital environment (Annmarie Adams, 2017). Hospitals were designed to no longer look like the previous archetype of a hospital. Into the 1960s, patient wards in postwar hospitals were designed to be orderly, predictable, and efficient, replicas of a well-run office.

Figure 1: In the 1960s, patient wards were designed to be orderly, predictable, and effective, mirroring a well-run office.

The age of mall hospitals: