The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity

By Michael P. Murphy

Michael Murphy of MASS Design is a story about the design and life of hospitals―how they are born and evolve, the forces that shape them and the shifts that conspire to hinder them.

Reading architecture through the history of hospitals offers a tool for unlocking the elemental principles of architecture and the intractable laws of human and social conditions that architecture serves in each of our lives. This book encounters brilliant and visionary designers who were hospital architects and systems designers, driven by the aim of social change. They faced the contradictions of health care in their time and found innovative ways to solve specific medical dilemmas. Designers and professionals such as Filarete, Lluís Domènech I Montaner, Albert Schweitzer, Gordon Friesen, E. Todd Wheeler and Eberhard Zeidler are studied here. In contrast, the medical spaces of more widely known architects such as Isambard Brunel, Aalvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph also help inform this history. All these characters were polymaths and provocateurs, but none entirely summarises this history more succinctly than Florence Nightingale. In laying out her guidelines for ward design in 1859, the latter shows how the design of a medical facility can influence an entire political and social order.