Every year, architects, medics and designers head to European Healthcare Design to share and debate the most exciting developments in Healthcare design.
This year we — Art in Site — took over a room downstairs, collaborating with artist Paola Rozo to capture conversations, lecture insights, ideas and case studies into a “Living Drawing”. What started as a cluster of small drawings grew into an extraordinary 4.5m mural — a memento to the conference, and a creative response to nuances of debates and insights. It’s a totally unique piece of work, and an experiment in listening, conversing, questioning, reframing, and creating.
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The theme this year at the conference was Global Resilience, which puts our role as healthcare artists and designers in a much larger context: the climate crisis, the pandemic, the fallout of war, and pressures on economies and politics. An immediate question hangs in the air... “how on earth can we make sense of such complexity — it’s bleak, it’s interconnected, and we, as designers can only do so much...”. Yet, over two days of jam-packed talks, debates, chats in the garden, workshops, themes and issues arose, helping us to see this complexity afresh.
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Sitopia
Could food be the most important forgotten variable? Carolyn Steele thinks so, and on the very first morning brought the incredible idea of “Sitopia” to life showing how food needs to be much more fundamental to the way we think about designing for resilience, even in healthcare and hospital design. Architects picked up on this biotic theme, reiterating the value of natural light in several new projects. I learned that natural light is enshrined as a legal right for workers within the design of Danish capital project buildings — they are entitled to 2h a day. This has super interesting ramifications for the layout of staff spaces, corridor widths, window placement....
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“Even Lego doesn’t build hospitals from Lego!”
As conference moved on, a deep tension arose in response to resilient design: the modular vs bespoke. One the one hand we need bespoke buildings that can adapt to the increasingly local challenges of their environments and communities. A fantastic example showcased at EHD this year is the New North Zeland Hospital in Hillerod — which is designed to react to 100-year projections of flooding, adapting to its unique position in a marshland area — a first for hospital design. And yet the advantages of modular approaches were on show in Godstrup — one of six new “super hospitals” in Denmark, which is composed of entirely repeated units that can be re-purposed to allow for new clinical functions — something that would make it hugely future proof to the increasing shocks of pandemics etc., which demand a sudden reset of whole departments and layout functions.
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Hospital dressed up as a city? Or a hospital that embraces its own unique aesthetic?
Various new “superhospital” projects proposed seeing the hospital in terms of city- planning, in terms of eg. a mall, a street, a factory, and other public zones. This chimed with recent projects at AiS, where architect collaborators of ours have proposed interior schemes through the lens of eg a “hotel, spa, playground”. Though this sets new ambitions for hospitals, it raises the question as to whether we have given up altogether on a positive hospital aesthetic. Rather than cloaking it in sheep’s clothing, surely we could be celebrating a new, positive hospital image — one that represents its community and shows its inner workings? This is something we have attempted to do more in recent work, such as our app for Children’s Emergency, which introduces patients to the illustrations of environment and people to empower and enlighten them through storytelling and play.
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Beyond Walls
There were some fascinating conversations about the need to extend health and the hospital beyond its silo walls — in particular, as to how designers can engage Roma, Gypsy, and Traveller communities, and those who are digitally offline, particularly over-75s. This year’s winner of the interior and arts prize — the Cambell town Hospital Redevelopment included commissioned artworks from Nicole Monks, an artist of Yamaji Wajarri, Dutch and English heritage, who ran a collaborative process with Aboriginal elders:
“Monks is working with the local Aboriginal community to development creative outcomes within the built environment of Campbelltown Hospital. Nicole is being mentored by local Aboriginal elders and working collaboratively with the local Aboriginal community to ensure cultural protocols and practices are followed. The outcomes of this deep engagement will result in the presentation of multi-dimensional narratives centering on Dharawal culture.”
This idea generally chimed with recent conversations I hosted in partnership with EHD in the spring — in particular two art projects that have tried to look beyond the siloing of social communities to reconnect spaces: Beyond Walls, produced by Ginkgo Projects, and Gong, by Kirstine Roepstorff. Both of these projects are reminders that art can help address a long standing issue of silo-hospitals: their relative isolation from the rest of society, and the health benefits of making patient groups feel more connected with a wider civic culture. See this article by me for more thinking on this if you’re interested.
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Utilising a floor grid for LIVE ACTION co-design with staff
Finally, an exciting process was on display from Godstrup Hospital. Architects Artkitema worked with clinical staff in grid-marked spaces, asking them to practise for multiple scenarios, using real beds & equipment. This was their live test space — a place for practising, learning, rethinking, measuring, and re-thinking. Crucially, staff and architects learned truths about the typical widest dimensions needed for different clinical spaces, by keeping track of where beds etc. were being maneuvered within the grid. This then fed back into the building layout design. It’s a nice reminder that rigor and play can be bedfellows.
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