The magazine ‘Geht doch – Future-Oriented Hospital Architecture: Staff-Friendly, Digital and Climate-Neutral’ explores the current challenges facing hospital design and presents a range of approaches to sustainable, human-centred healthcare architecture. The feature ‘Buildings that Help Heal’ examines the principles of healing-supportive hospital design and the influence of space, daylight, nature and materiality on well-being and health.
One of our early projects, the Agatharied District Hospital, is featured as an example of a building that was already implementing key principles of Healing Architecture in the late 1990s. Instead of a monolithic hospital structure, the design creates an ensemble of individual building volumes with human proportions. Natural light, views of the surrounding landscape, landscaped courtyards, timber and short circulation routes continue to shape the character of the hospital today.
In the accompanying interview ‘Our Work Is Always Centred on People’, Prof. Christine Nickl-Weller discusses how architecture can contribute to recovery, why a sense of normality and autonomy plays an important role in hospitals, and why liveable healthcare architecture must address the needs of staff just as much as those of patients.
