Book Review: Innovations in Hospital Architecture

Abstract

Innovations in Hospital Architecture. (2010). Stephen Verderber. New York: Routledge. Hardcover, 373 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0-415- 77795-7. $42.99Those of us who teach and conduct research in healthcare design know how difficult it can be to convince architecture and design students that hospital design is a valid and fascinating area of creative activity. Too often hospital design, in the student's mind, is purely a technical exercise that shuffles treatment boxes to optimize an adjacency matrix. Reading Stephen Verderber's body of work over the past decade reminds us that his primary mission is to convince the design establishment that healthcare environments should be viewed as the ecological and aesthetic equivalent of the performance space, the museum, even that most sacred of academic design exercises-a house for a poet. In his most recent book, Innovations in Hospital Architecture (2010), he argues that healthcare facilities should set the standard by which society judges the success or failure of designers in constructing more sustainable, functional, and beautiful built environments.A hospital/medical center can no longer think of itself as an island, or for whatever reasons exempt from its urban ecological context. It must now also demonstrate leadership in environmental stewardship from the building and campus scale to the intermediate scale of its neighborhood, to the scale of the city, region, and entire planet. (Verderber, 2010, p. 4)From this ambitious introduction, Dr. Verderber creates a narrative that attempts to show how healthcare architecture can provide a setting for the most advanced forms of medical practice as well as create a physical environment that enhances human well-being. In this respect, the book should be seen as a work of architectural theory as much as a guide to healthcare design.A number of factors make Innovations in Hospital Architecture a timely addition to the designer's library. Since Roger Ulrich initiated studies in the early 1980s to show the positive effects that built environments can have on human health, researchers and designers have accumulated a convincing body of data that connects the altruistic dimensions of good architecture-views of nature, natural lighting and ventilation systems, social synergies, functional efficiency-to real and measurable indices of health and wellness. Most architects, not only healthcare designers, now use the term evidence-based design to describe a form of practice that was unheard of a decade ago. Authors as diverse as Frumkin, Frank, and Jackson (2004) and Esther Sternberg (2009) argue persuasively for the public health official, the epidemiologist, and the physician to pay close attention to the healing power contained in all levels and scales of built places. Verderber's book enhances the current literature and provides useful examples of how the designer should be seen as a full partner in the healthcare delivery system.Stephen Verderber has published extensively on the architecture of healthcare. Innovations in Hospital Architecture is his fourth book in this field, and it draws together the interconnected technical, aesthetic, social, and historical threads that constitute an appropriate architectural response to healthcare designs. The book begins with a quick historical overview of the hospital to convince readers that the original and fundamental purpose of this building type was to be the physical mediator between the natural environment and the healing process. He demonstrates why the modern hospital designer should look for inspiration in the Nightingale ward, not as an analog for how to configure inpatient floor plates, but as a reminder of why the exterior view, the social needs of the family and caregivers, and the creation of a physical nursing culture remain critical planning issues in the 21st century.The primary weakness of the book is the degree to which, as a sequel, it requires the reader to have absorbed the lessons of Verderber's two companion pieces, Healthcare Architecture in an Era of Radical Transformation (Verderber & Fine, 2000) and Innovations in Hospice Architecture (Verderber & Refuerzo, 2006). …