Healthcare Design - January/February 2022 - 13

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space between treating the individual and recognizing their dignity and
managing massive population health issues, like outbreak and complicated
medical procedures. Often between the two extremes is where design
emerges to navigate the differences between an institution and feeling institutionalized.
That feeling of hospitality is where dignity emerges-and is
absent from so many medical spaces.
Why did you start your book with a look at Prentice Women's Hospital,
an iconic project in Chicago that closed in 2011?
Prentice is a strong example of how hospitals can be designed from the inside
out to respond to idealized parameters of care, such as the relationship
and distance between the nurse/staff and the patient. In Prentice, the quatrefoil
structure was based on this number that architect Bertrand Goldberg
was analyzing and the idealized geometry that optimized it-in this
case, a semicircular form around a nursing station. While Prentice eventually
was demolished because it was hard to adapt, it does show how the
DNA of hospital design is always infused with ideas of health outcomes and
behavior-shaping strategies.
The book discusses past epidemics alongside the evolution of architecture.
What impact do you think the current pandemic will have?
The pandemic is already shaping how the public thinks of the buildings
around them. The use of outdoor waiting, social distancing, and new air
handling mitigation systems in all typologies suggests that our health
as a priority in buildings has migrated beyond the hospital into other
building types. I think new policies will emerge that demand higher
airflow rates and more access to windows and operable fenestration. I
hope that those changes begin to thin out and shrink floor plates, and
remind us of some of the lessons of medical facilities from a century ago
for how to adapt.
What's one takeaway in your book for the design community?
That hospitals have been an understudied and undertheorized typology of
architecture, and that by studying them, we learn more about the foundational
workings of architecture than by looking at other typologies that are
less complicated. Hospitals are uber-architecture. They reveal all the complexities
and hope of the discipline and make us realize how essential good
design is for us to live a full and healthy life.
The release of your book accompanies an exhibition at Cooper
Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Tell us about that.
The show began before the pandemic, and it was about these questions of
how design and health shape us and our society. The pandemic only reinforced
this thesis and in real time we had examples we had to include. We
shifted and redesigned the exhibit so we could have both current and historical
examples narrate our daily lives as we lived through the pandemic.
What's one goal or hope you have for healthcare design in 2022?
That the industry sees its role as not just effectively shaping buildings from
complicated policies and guidelines, but as the agent that will transform architectural
thinking and typologies in the world. That, historically, has been
the case, and I think it will be again after the pandemic. -Anne DiNardo,
executive editor
For an extended interview with Michael Murphy, visit HCDmagazine.com/michael-murphy-2022.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022
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http://www.HCDmagazine.com/michael-murphy-2022 http://modulararts.com
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