"Healing by Design"

The current issue of Ode has an article on how hospital architecture affects healing:

Many hospitals are “built catastrophes, anonymous institutional complexes run by vast bureaucracies, and totally unfit for the purpose they have been designed for,” writes Dutch architectural historian Cor Wagenaar in The Architecture of Hospitals, an international collection of groundbreaking studies, essays and hospital design plans published this summer by the Netherlands Architecture Institute. “They are hardly ever functional, and instead of making patients feel at home, they produce stress and anxiety.”
The consequences can be serious. Recent studies show that stress may hinder healing by intensifying pain, suppressing the immune system and causing heart problems, insomnia and depression. By inadvertently heightening patients’ stress, hospitals may be undermining patients’ recovery.

However there is a new hospital design movement arising:

The transformation is already happening at places like the new Rikshopitalet University Hospital in Oslo, Norway, where architects designed a large facility on a human scale inspired by the comforting layout of a traditional village. “To promote health is to promote security and well-being,” writes Arvid Ottar, chief architect of the new hospital. “For us, such feelings are linked strongly to the feeling of recognition. We felt that our solution lay more in the domain of town planning than architecture.”

Read the entire article here.