The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity

“The study of hospital design isn’t ancillary to larger architectural themes but central to the story of architecture itself. The old modernist argument between form and function is seen within hospital design with unique salience and clarity, in part because the consequences of this debate are so directly felt by people who need health care. . . . Care for others is the ultimate expression of human dignity.” —Phillip Kennicott on The Architecture of Health, The Washington Post, December 16, 2021  The Architecture of Health charts historical epidemics alongside modern and contemporary architectural transformations in service of medicine, health and habitation, exploring how infrastructure facilitates healing and architecture’s greater role in constructing our societies. Reading architecture through the history of hospitals offers a tool for unlocking the elemental principles of architecture and the intractable laws of human and social conditions that architecture serves in each o