Introducing Landscape As A Healing Factor In Hospital Design

Abstract

Along history, nature was seen as a powerful healing agent in human life; from Middle Ages monasteries and churches through pavilion hospitals and asylums of the Century to hospitals of the early 20 century. However, at the middle of the twentieth century, some emerging technological factors negatively affected the use of landscape in hospitals design. These factors included technological development in medicine and real estate values, and the developments in building construction. As a result, hospitals‟ environments became more institutional and overwhelming; and therefore, they helped in instilling anxiety instead of hope. Hospital administrators and providers began to notice the negative reactions to the prevailing non supportive environments. Consequently, in the 1980s and 1990s attention was drawn again to nature significance in hospitals triggered by contemporary researches and studies proving that encountering nature diversities in hospitals can act as a mitigating factor and generate several psychophysical benefits to its users. A new concept has emerged to reintroduce nature in healthcare facilities; this concept is called „healing landscape‟. It became a viable field of research in many countries; nevertheless, most of Cairo‟s hospitals did not pay attention to this pivotal issue which resulted in creating misused, unused, or abandoned outdoor spaces. Therefore, this thesis aims at creating a preliminary design and evaluation tool for hospital landscaping; and hence, investigating the problems associated with designing the outdoor spaces in Cairo hospitals; either general speciality or single speciality (psychiatric-children). This aim is achieved in five chapters; Chapter One is a literature review that identifies the theories, studies, and speculations demonstrating nature benefits to patients, the chronology of hospital landscaping, the impacts of gardens‟ evanescence in most of modern hospitals, and the emergence of healing landscape concept. Chapter Two is concerned with examining healing landscape design through reviewing the philosophical approaches of its design and strategies, benchmarks, and guidelines generated by several researchers and landscape architects. Chapter Three includes reviewing the international experiences of hospital landscaping via analysing examples of healing gardens with distinctive or awarded designs in order to add values to the previous benchmarks and guidelines and help identifying different approaches of meeting the design strategies mentioned in chapter two. Then, a preliminary design matrix is proposed to help in assessing the local context in the nest chapter. In Chapter Four, local hospital landscaping is addressed by reviewing the local regulations of hospitals design and assessing the outdoor spaces of selected local case studies. This chapter revealed that there is a lack in the local context awareness of the significance of restorative outdoor spaces for hospital users. Finally, Chapter Five includes general results and recommendations for increasing the awareness of healing landscape significance in the local hospitals and modifying the local regulations to adopt this concept in its requirements.