Modern Hospice Design: The Architecture of Palliative Care

Abstract

Ken Worpole's book explores the architectural challenges and design issues presented by modern hospices [1]. Set within the context of the history of the architecture of palliative care and the concerns and fears that have been articulated about hospitals as places to die, Worpole asks if hospices offer a new building type. As the author of many books on architecture, landscape and urban design and as an adviser to the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), Worpole is in a strong position to provide a substantial answer to the question he asks. Since the founding of the modern hospice movement by Dame Cicely Saunders with the opening of St Christopher's Hospice in Sydenham in 1967, the idea of an uplifting design and setting has always been at the forefront. Today, with over 8,750 hospices worldwide, it remains a health movement that is still essentially inspired, administered and funded by religious and voluntary organizations whose primary object is to provide dignity and care at the end of life. Hospices have evidently been successful in assuaging people's fear of dying.