DETAIL 4.2026: Concept – Healthcare Buildings

Recovery Position

Good design has the power to influence and support the human healing process. Because recovery is a process rather than a static state, it requires transitional spaces that foster transformation and facilitate social interaction. In this context, space does not merely serve as a form of complementary medicine; it is an environment with an agency of its own.

Often, it is only the absence of health that prompts us to truly examine it. This was the case for Charles Jencks, who, following his wife’s cancer diagnosis, laid the foundations for the therapy centres named after Maggie Keswick Jencks. Jencks described the first Maggie’s Centre, which opened 20 years ago in Edinburgh, as an “architecture of hope”. Similarly, Roger S. Ulrich, most recently a professor of architecture in Sweden, investigated the impact of nature on health in the mid-1980s while facing his own illness. His personal experience of nature’s restorative power led him to publish the seminal study that underpins all subsequent design approaches within the field of “healing architecture”.

This issue presents exemplary special-purpose buildings from the healthcare sector that achieve exactly this. The mental health clinic by C. F. Møller in London, Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter’s healthcare centre in Copenhagen, and the Children’s Hospital in Zurich by Herzog & de Meuron are contrasted with smaller-scale pilot projects, such as the health kiosks designed by Pasel-K Architects as rural primary care infrastructure in Thüringen. Healing, it seems, knows no scale. The complex correlations between architecture and life are far from fully understood. As a young discipline, this field of architecture remains in constant flux.