How crucial is the architecture of a hospital for your state of mind, for your health, for your brain, for your recovery? Healing spaces have an effect on health. A few examples: Anxiety decreases, blood pressure is reduced, the duration of the patient's stay is reduced. Use of plants, color, light works, reduces costs for a hospital. Seeing, for example, a natural landscape from your bed makes for a faster improvement . In his book Places of the Soul (p. 10), architect Christopher Day explains that we are often unaware of how an environment affects us. "We spend so much time in or near buildings that it is true to say that most of our environmental experience is affected by architecture" (10).
An experience is a subjective experience. How is this experience formed? How will this experience be formed in the future? I think the story of the patient begins in the waiting room / lounge and maybe before, when he or she walks up the stairs and enters a hospital through the sliding doors. People naturally have a kind of empathy with a building, unconsciously, they project physical conditions, categories on buildings. Psychological studies have shown that people identify the structure and symmetry of a building with the body. For example, they speak of an upper and lower, a front and a back, a head and the heart of a lifeless structure (Bizarre Architecture, Charles Jencks, 14). "Buildings can be seen as the third human skin" (Places of the Soul, 42). A building breathes, absorbs, evaporates, regulates the exchange between "inside" and "outside".
What's up, what's under, what's the head and what's the heart of the Orthopedic Surgery Floor? How is the exchange between inside and outside at the waiting room / lounge?
The above image is an example of a waiting room as it is currently in use at the department. As a visitor / patient, you have two choices: either you are sitting on the blue chairs or sitting in front of the in / out and seeing nursing / visitors / patients walking continuously (these chairs are not visible in the picture). I see an entry and exit that is unrecognizable as a reference point.
Each door / opening entrance creates expectations. The patient must experience a new space, landscape, "inside" that differs from the previous one. When he or she walks around the corner, unpredictable colorful shapes must wait the walker
Each door is a boundary, one area is closed to another, but also a connection between inside and outside. Private and public, the known and the unknown are united (Contemporary Doorways Architectural Entrances, Transition and Tresholds, 6). Doors can be simple or graceful, inviting or rejecting. Doors can have hinges, they can be repulsive, there are louvre doors or small openings.
The size of the entry / exit, the order of entry, the choice of the material, all those aspects can be used to call a response. In the case of space for a hospital- waitingroom: anticipation, activation, security, creativity.
Already reading the theory about space, color, proportion, light effects and the healing rooms, I begin to see images of possible narrative starting spaces.
