Category: Books

Innovations in Hospice Architecture by Stephen Verderber and Ben J. Refuerzo

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This fully revised, new edition of Innovations in Hospice Architecture responds to the need for an up-to-date, theoretically based reference book summarizing key historical and recent developments with respect to this rapidly evolving building type. This Second Edition presents:

• an overview of the historical origins of the contemporary hospice
• the diverse variations on the basic premise of hospice care
• a review of the scant architectural literature published on this subject to date
• a broad series of case studies of exemplary hospices around the world
• planning and design concepts for palliative care environments.

Case study projects are from Japan, Canada, Europe, Africa, Australia, Indonesia, China, the United States and South America. Thirty-six case studies are individually presented and comparatively analysed, and prognostications for the future of hospice architecture are examined. Each case includes floor plans, technical drawings and beautiful, full colour illustrations. Through an in-depth discussion of the inner profundities of hospice architecture, the book presents this type as a humane, genuine expression of the spiritual, physical and psychosocial dimensions of the contemporary death and dying movement. Written with a broad audience in mind, the book provides both technical and conceptual information, blending narrative, images and diagrammation so that the audience may understand and articulate the complexities of this specialized building type in professional practice contexts.

Sprawling Cities and Our Endangered Public Health by Stephen Verderber

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Sprawl is an unsustainable pattern of growth that threatens to undermine the health of communities globally. It has been a dominant mid-to-late twentieth century growth pattern in developed countries and in the twenty-first century has shown widespread signs of proliferation in India, China, and other growing countries. The World Health Organization cites sprawl for its serious adverse public health consequences for humans and ecological habitats. The many adverse impacts of sprawl on the health of individuals, communities, and biological ecosystems are well documented. Architects have been rightly criticized for failing to grasp the aesthetic and functional challenge to create buildings and places that mitigate sprawl while simultaneously promoting healthier, active lifestyles in neighborhoods and communities.

Sprawling Cities and Our Endangered Public Health examines the past and present role of architecture in relation to the public health consequences of unmitigated sprawl and the ways in which it threatens our future. Topics examined include the role of twentieth century theories of architecture and urbanism and their public health ramifications, examples of current unsustainable practices, design considerations for the creation of health-promoting architecture and landscape urbanism, a critique of recent case studies of sustainable alternatives to unchecked sprawl, and prognostications for the future.

Architects, public health professionals, landscape architects, town planners, and a broad range of policy specialists will be able to apply the methods and tools presented here to counter unmitigated sprawl and to create architecture that promotes active, healthier lifestyles. Stephen Verderber is an internationally respected evidence-based researcher/practitioner/educator in the emerging, interdisciplinary field of architecture, health, and society. This, his latest book on the interactions between our buildings, our cities and our health, is an invaluable reference source for everyone concerned with sustainable architecture and landscape urbanism.

Innovations in Hospital Architecture by Stephen Verderber

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This indispensable reference book captures key recent developments in the rapidly evolving field of sustainable hospital architecture. Today’s architects must provide hospitals which enable high quality care for diverse patient populations in carbon neutral care settings, and this book succinctly considers what needs to be done in order to meet that challenge. The contemporary hospital is viewed in the context of global climate change, the planet’s diminishing natural resources and the spiralling cost of operating healthcare facilities.

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.

Beautifully and extensively illustrated with many photographs, diagrams and floor plans, this is essential reading for all architects, planners, engineers, product manufacturers, clients, healthcare providers and government agencies involved in the present and future of sustainable healthcare environments.

Delirious New Orleans: Manifesto for an Extraordinary American City by Stephen Verderber

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From iconic neighborhoods such as the French Quarter and the Garden District to more economically modest but no less culturally vibrant areas, architecture is a key element that makes New Orleans an extraordinary American city. Delirious New Orleans began as a documentary project to capture the idiosyncratic vernacular architecture and artifacts–vintage mom-and-pop businesses, roadside motels, live music clubs, neon signs, wall murals, fast-food joints, and so on–that helped give the city’s various neighborhoods their unique character. But because so many of these places and artifacts were devastated by Hurricane Katrina, Delirious New Orleans has become both a historical record of what existed in the past and a blueprint for what must be rebuilt and restored to retain the city’s unique multicultural landscape.

Stephen Verderber starts with the premise that New Orleans’s often-overlooked neighborhoods imbue the city with deep authenticity as a place. He opens Delirious New Orleans with a photo-essay that vividly presents this vernacular architecture and its artifacts, both before Katrina and in its immediate aftermath. In the following sections of the book, which are also heavily illustrated, 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.

Compassion in Architecture: Evidence-based Design for Health in Louisiana by Stephen Verderber

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The element of passion in a work of architecture, usually centered on formal composition, materials, and siting, tends to obscure serious critical attention accorded to a building’s lived qualities and too often ignores a building’s social meaning or compassionate intent. “Compassion in Architecture: Evidence-based Design for Health in Louisiana” represents an approach that reconciles such contradictory concerns in architecture. It is a call for a new era of social advocacy in architectural design, one that truly incorporates the formal, experiential, and human aspects of architecture.

The discussion centers on a method for improving treatment settings for underrepresented minority populations and medically underserved patients throughout Louisiana. The evidence-based research and design (EBR&D) process is applied to the reinvention of Louisiana’s network of community care clinics and public health support facilities.

Author Stephen Verderber spent over a decade compiling information for this book, which contains several first person narratives and eight case studies. Combined with his architect’s eye for a successful physical structure, the personal stories and examples reveal underlying broader social, political, and cultural dimensions and reinforce the presentation of a lexicon of generative planning and design principles and guidelines.

The research and design work is centered on the importance of compassionate architecture for community health in the civic realm, and the enduring significance of places for health care in a community. The reader is carefully taken through each step in the process, from project inception to completion and post-occupancy assessment, in what is likely the longest continuously running evidence-based research and design initiative to date.

More than just a call to architectural arms, “Compassion in Architecture” is a detailed analysis of what components are necessary and vital to a community’s public health facility. Verderber utilizes numerous illustrations, diagrams, and charts to support his text, making this study all the more informative.

Healthcare Architecture in an Era of Radical Transformation by Stephen Verderber and David Fine

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In the 1960s and 1970s large, high-technology, in-patient 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 ageing and aged population, and cyberclinics and virtual hospitals.