Designing Facilities For Children Is Now At The Cutting Edge Of Healthcare Design

Hussain Varawalla

Healthcare Spaces No 2 Author: Larry Fuersich Publisher: Visual Reference

What can I say, but Hallelujah! My first review copy, may it be the first of many (are all you publishers out there listening?), amen. Healthcare Spaces No 2 (can’t say it enough times, really) contains within its bulk a veritable cornucopia of imagery to gladden the heart of any healthcare architect. Is it corny to use words like that? According to me by now famous Webster’s Collegiate it means (among other things) ‘an abundant supply’. Healthcare Spaces No 2 (enough already, we will now call it ‘the book’) qualifies for that descriptive noun as it gives us architects an abundant supply of interior and exterior views of healthcare spaces arranged alphabetically by the names of their architects, with a brief write-up on each project, maybe a bit too brief, but after all it is a ‘visual reference’ publication, so we will give Larry and Roger the benefit of the doubt.

Roger? Who Roger? Roger what? Well, that’s Roger Yee, the editor of The Book. He looks dashing and debonair in his jacket photograph (more and more of which are in color now, whatever happened to those arty black and whites?) He is smiling and confident in his jacket and tie, as well he should be, he is a graduate of Yale School of Architecture and has received many honours from organisations, such as the American Institute of Architects, among others. If you buy the book and read about Roger on the inside of the back cover you will learn that he has worked with Philip Johnson and John Burgee to which I can only say Wow! Roger, it shows!

Back to Healthcare Spaces No 2, excuse me, ‘the book’. For three days, ever since I opened that packet from the US mail, I have been wondering how to go about reviewing this book, a picture being worth a thousand words, and there may well be a thousand pictures in this book! Well, my two current hottest and most interesting projects are two Children’s Hospitals, and there are obvious synergies with the book, so I decided I would review only the children’s hospitals in it. At last count there were 17 such projects profiled, the previous two counts producing 16 and 18 respectively. So these three counts brought me back to square one.

In the Introduction, Roger says: “With 60 per cent of adults and 20 per cent of children now overweight or obese, the nations healthcare institutions are responding by such means as building or renovating emergency departments, cardiovascular centres and children’s hospitals.”

Well neither 60 per cent of adults nor 20 per cent of children are ‘overweight or obese’ in India, but I guess different strokes for different folks. Getting back to the point, we are forewarned there will be a lot of children’s hospitals in the book. It also reinforces my belief that designing healthcare facilities for children is now at the cutting edge of healthcare design, I have first-hand knowledge of the difficulties and the complex moral and design issues involved, especially when a specialist paediatric hospital caters to the uppermost and lowermost levels of Indian society. In India, there are complex social issues involved which may be difficult for a Western society to understand.

The very cover of the book features a paediatric hospital, the Duke University Children’s Health Center, Durham, NC. It depicts the atrium of the Center, a waiting area with comfortable lounge chairs in cheerful blue and yellow ochre, round pink table tops. Lounging in one of these comfortable lounge chairs is a character from the television series, Kermit the Frog. The point I’m trying to make is that to find the equivalent of Kermit as a commonality between the kids of this upper and lower strata of our society here in India will be next to impossible, I can see us inevitably using Kermit in his blue and yellow ochre chair, and intimidating and unnerving one section of the kids (not to mention their parents). The money, however, that will be paying for the treatment of these intimidated and unnerved kids will be coming form the Kermit Kids (or rather, their parents.)

Anyway, peace. I cannot shoulder the worries of the world, I can at best muddle on with my life, more power to Kermit’s elbow, he has inherited this Earth.

I have inserted little slips of paper in the book at all the children’s hospitals. I started out with four long strips, hoping to find four, soon I was tearing them in half, and then in half again. So they ended up as very short strips of paper, inevitably some have fallen out. I am offering this as an excuse for not reviewing all 17 (16? 18?) hospitals, I just opened one strip marked page at random and I came up with the Phoenix Children’s Hospital, Phoenix, Arizona, the architects being Karlsberger Companies (what kind of name is that for an architectural firm, it sounds like a multinational company making beer…) and the write-up tells us they designed it in collaboration with the Stein-Cox Group (another multinational making anything and everything…). To give credit where it is due, however, they have made a wonderful job of it, it is an award-winning facility, (we are not told which award) with 3,51,987 square feet of renovation of a shuttered ‘60’s facility (I can feel some junior architects agony in that ‘87’ at the end) with 38,040 square feet of new construction. It has Emilio Ambasz colours, beautiful colours really, rusty browns and reds, yellow ochre and orange, leafy greens I love it.

The very next page has the St Vincent Children’s Hospital, at Indianapolis in Indiana. All I can say is that I would rather be a child living in Phoenix, not that I wish ill-health on any such child, Arizona is a rocking state and its children are cool.

To conclude, the end of the book gives us an article by Roger titled ‘No Waiting Room’ about the state of healthcare and healthcare facilities in the US, very few advertisements, and an Index of Resources and an Index of Projects.

The Index of Resources contains an alphabetical listing of projects with names of their designers and general contractors and some of the companies that have supplied stuff used in the project (for instance, the Beth Israel Medical Center contains furniture supplied by HBF and Herman Miller.)

Generally good, useful stuff in this book. If you’re into healthcare facilities, buy it, and if it turns you on, pass the good news around.

Varawalla is Director-Design Services, Hosmac India Pvt Ltd