The CircleBath Hospital in Bath, England, was designed by the high-profile architecture firm Foster + Partners to be a more pleasant place to convalesce:
CircleBath is Foster + Partners' first hospital and represents a radical departure from orthodox approaches to hospital planning. The three-storey building is set into the hills on the edge of protected green belt nine kilometres south east of Bath and its compact arrangement provides a ‘corridor-less' environment, encouraging a sense of community and well-being.
More pictures below.Institutions like hospitals and schools are places where the effects of good design go beyond style and aesthetics. Views of the outdoors help patients recover and natural light raises students' test scores. Architectural choices can have a dramatic effect on the ultimate purposes of these places. I don't know the extent to which Foster + Partners referred to empirical research on how environment affects recovery in developing CircleBath, but it's great to see design being taken seriously by administrators nonetheless.Via Jay Parkinson's excellent new blog, The Future Well.
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