Healthcare & Architecture

Healthcare facilities are often hostile and cold environments for individuals who are just looking for relief in a time of distress and worry. The unifying idea aims to focus on the environment and health. Specifically, health in the relation to pediatric oncology patients and their families. Designing architectural environments for the care and treatment of children with cancer requires a well-rounded approach encircling understanding, sympathy, universal, and creative design. To take this further, in terms of the environment I am largely talking about the atmosphere in which we inhabit, the atmosphere that makes up the space in which each of you are sitting in right now. This sense of atmosphere is our most important sense in terms of our existence and survival (Robinson, p151-152). It plays an extraordinarily large part in the healing process in which we are all prone to within a healthcare facility setting. Looking at the art of healing in a round-about and atmospheric view will give you deeper understanding of the unfamiliar side of healthcare, being not the physicians themselves as our primary art of healing, as we often see it but, the environment, making up the missing half of that healing. Acknowledging this atmospheric sense comes about in order to create a sense of wholistic balance of the environmental healing within a healthcare facility setting. Within hospitals, it is said that the environment in which we heal best are environments that are therapeutic, supportive of family involvement, and make us feel connected. The frightening specter of cancer and its treatments may demise a person?s feeling of control. It is essential for cancer patients to have a feeling of entitlement over their environment and in turn the disease along every step of the treatment and recovery cycle. Through a new and creative approach to architecture, atmosphere, and emotion?cancer healthcare facilities can encourage a growing hope, happiness, and healing in the best way possible for all involved. Through the process of designing a cancer healthcare facility braced with sustainable architectural ideas while intertwining nature may bring the added benefit of returning the healthcare building to its original, representative form, with a dependent healing process focusing on nature, atmosphere, and sustainability itself. Through a new and creative approach to sustainability, green design, atmosphere, and emotion, cancer healthcare facilities can encourage hope, happiness, and growth in the best way possible