A scary article about architecture

Bird to the North calls our attention to hospital design, and the article "How Hospital Design Saves Lives," subtitled "Design changes can cut infection rates, lower physician errors, improve staff performance, and make all the difference in delivering care," from Business Week.

The article states that that errors are systems problems, that systems errors are a function of design and that it is a new day in architecture to recognize this and design accordingly. No wonder the built environment is so awry... From the article:

DESIGN FOR LIFE. But there is plenty more to be done and one of the most promising areas to focus on is design. "Hospitals are dangerous places because of systems, and systems are a design problem," explains Derek Parker, co-founder of the Center for Health Design, a nonprofit think-tank, and a director in San Francisco at Anshen + Allen Architects, a leading health-care design firm.

For Parker, the solution starts with the building. "We're expanding the definition of architecture. It isn't about choosing fabrics for the lobby," Parker adds.

Forget fancy entrances, healing gardens, and feng shui—more aesthetic elements of building design whose impact on patient health is easy to suppose but difficult to prove. Over the past seven years, hospital architects have increasingly awakened to the possibilities for design to save lives. To do that, they are taking a page from medicine's playbook.

Architecture shouldn't be so narrowly defined if it means a focus on aesthetics and not on the quality of use.

Index Keywords: architecture; urban-design-placemaking