A story about the design and life of hospitals--how they are born and
evolve, the forces that shape them and the shifts that conspire to
incapacitate them--from Michael Murphy of MASS Design
Reading architecture through the history of hospitals offers a tool for
unlocking the elemental principles of architecture and the intractable
laws of human and social conditions that architecture serves in each of
our lives. This book encounters brilliant and visionary designers who
were hospital architects but also systems designers, driven by the aim
of social change. They faced the contradictions of health care in their
time and found innovative ways to solve for specific medical dilemmas.
Designers and professionals such as Filarete, Lluís Domènech i Montaner,
Albert Schweitzer, Gordon Friesen, E. Todd Wheeler and Eberhard Zeidler
are studied here, while the medical spaces of more widely known
architects such as Isambard Brunel, Aalvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Louis
Kahn and Paul Rudolph also help inform this history. All these
characters were polymaths and provocateurs, but none quite summarizes
this history more succinctly than Florence Nightingale, who, in laying
out her guidelines for ward design in 1859, shows how the design of a
medical facility can influence an entire political and social order.
The Architecture of Health charts historical epidemics alongside
modern and contemporary architectural transformations in service of
medicine, health and habitation, exploring how infrastructure
facilitates healing and architecture's greater role in constructing our
societies.
"This incredible and important work is the first in memory to grant the
theoretical heft this oft-overlooked building type deserves, conveying
not only the technical complexity of hospitals throughout the decades,
but how they reflect societal, medical, and philosophical ideals. As the
designers of the most revolutionary and humane healthcare architecture
of recent decades, Murphy and his colleagues at MASS Design are the
perfect fit to author this richly illustrated, vital volume for our
pandemic age." --Sara Carr, assistant professor of architecture and
program director for the Master of Design in Sustainable Urban
Environments program at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts
and author of The Topography of Wellness: How Health and Disease Shaped
the American Urban Landscape (University of Virginia Press, 2021).
"Michael Murphy opens with an arresting premise--that the role of design
may be to "soften the blow" of systems that are indifferent to our
humanity. And then he proves it over and over again, applying the same
immaculately researched and considered approach to the pages of this
book that he does to his buildings. By seamless weaving history, theory
and practice, Mr. Murphy models and powerfully conveys the opportunity
to construct the health care systems we deserve." --Dr. Neel Shah,
American physician, assistant professor, Harvard University in
Cambridge, Massachusetts and founder of the nonprofit organizations
Costs of Care and March for Moms
"'Where is the design?' Michael Murphy asks. Hospitals are always
engineered, but seldom designed. I am thankful for this indispensable
book, in which Murphy scans history for traditional typologies of health
care facilities and visionary innovations to highlight the need for all
that great design can offer, committed not only to human bodies and
social control, but rather to society and to the full spectrum of needs
and feelings that make us human. Respect and dignity above all." --Paola
Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture & Design and Director of
Research & Development at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City
