Stephen Verderber considers the future of the hospital, and supplies a compendium of 100 planning and design considerations for the building type. The book includes twenty-eight case studies of built and unbuilt hospitals from around the world. These are grouped into five types – autonomous community based hospitals, children’s hospitals, rehabilitation and elderly care centres and hospitals, regional medical centre campuses, and visionary (unbuilt) projects.
Verderber takes us on a tour of the city’s commercial vernacular architecture, as well as the expressive folk architecture of its African American neighborhoods. He discusses how the built environment was profoundly shaped by New Orleans’s history of race and class inequities and political maneuvering, along with its peculiar, below-sea-level geography. Verderber also considers the aftermath of Katrina and the armada of faceless FEMA trailers that have, at least temporarily and by default, transformed this urban landscape.
This book combines the author’s background as a practicing architect with his research activities as a Professor of Architecture at Tulane University. It showcases his twin passions: concern for social justice in the delivery of health services to the poor, frequently minority populations, and the development of a new paradigm for architectural practice rooted in closer correlation of design intent and design effect.
In the 1960s and 1970s large, high-technology, inpatient oriented hospitals reflected the central role of such facilities in an expanding healthcare system. But hospital architecture and the healthcare system have vastly changed since then, in profound and unpredicted ways. This book explores for the first time how and why acute care hospitals and the often related psychiatric facilities, retirement communities, and community clinics have been transformed during the final decades of the twentieth century.The authors also consider utopian visions of unbuilt work and look ahead to the possible healthcare landscape of the future: “health villages,” home-based care for the aging and aged population, and cyberclinics and virtual hospitals.
