The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture

A strong visual text that makes research on hospital architecture comprehensible. This book addresses hospital architecture as a set of interlocked, overlapping spatial and social conditions, identifying ways that hospital spaces work to produce desired outcomes such as greater patient safety, increased care provider communication, and more intelligible corridors. The volume brings together emerging research on hospital environments. Opening with a description of hospital architecture that emphasizes everyday relations, the book examines the patient room and its intervisibility with adjacent spaces, care teams and on-ward support for their work, and the intelligibility of public circulation spaces for visitors. The final chapter moves outside the hospital to describe the current healthcare crisis of the global pandemic. Reflective essays by practicing designers follow each chapter, bringing perspectives from professional practice into the discussion. This volume provides new insights into how to better design hospitals through principles that have been tested empirically. It will become a reference for healthcare planners, designers, architects, and administrators, as well as for readers from sociology, psychology, and other areas of the social sciences.