Researching hospital design and incidentally leafing through sarkis' book on le corbusier's venice hospital, i was struck (but not) with the overwhelming championing of the building as an example of a mat building, as if the solipsism of the generic design method superseded the culture of hospital spatial organization that had started marking the disadvantages of a dense mega-hospital in the late 60s. And a hospital is a damn complex machine, much moreso than a house whose complexity one largely defines. The complexity and continuous development of the program as well as the changing nature of nursing care , more than anything, has forced the megahospital to implode and scatter within the landscape. There is also an uncanny resemblance to Schumacher and Rogner's 'After Ford' thesis of a programmatic monolith that overtakes and breaks down into a larger scape. And currently, the two more interesting poles of hospital design are

1- the eventual disappearance of the hospital altogether. care comes to you. this scenario is part of the move towards universalizing the house (office, hospital,virtual networking...)

2-the very en vogue idea of a 'health mini-city' where the hospital is virtually a health themed city.

which leaves me thinking that the denominator is the typical 'western' duality...a domestic-societal/urban angst. either inside or outside, either. in a place where the mortuary usually is discreetly waiting on its nether floors, the angst is all the more acute. would u want to die in your bedroom looking at your favourite apple tree, the one you helped your father plant decades ago. Or do you want to die in a disneylike urban spa,with your family around you, your last safari/beach resort/whatever adventure? I gues the thought of where you want to die (flick: Last Night - the last scene on a rooftop overlooking the city set against the impossible desire to die with the family at home...truely an illustration of the mentioned dualistic angst...and anyway, the whole film revolves around it ) really 'hits home', so to speak, brings the domestic and the urban into collision...(isn't the ambulance a wailing signifier of that collision carrying you from home to hospital?)


And ssn't it telling that Larkin (see below) calls his poem The Building..not The Hospital?..perhaps because the hospital is an archetype of an ultimate (at many times, literally) architecture that we can never be trully at rest with/in...therefor The Building.Even the capsed B looks both domineering and threatening..since a B could very well sway, topple off the line and crush you...unlike the more structurally sound H.


Larkin's brief:

Philip Larkin - The Building

Higher than the handsomest hotel
The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,
All round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall
Like a great sigh out of the last century.
The porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up
At the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall
As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.

There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a cup,
Like an airport lounge, but those who tamely sit
On rows of steel chairs turning the ripped mags
Haven't come far. More like a local bus.
These outdoor clothes and half-filled shopping-bags
And faces restless and resigned, although
Every few minutes comes a kind of nurse

To fetch someone away: the rest refit
Cups back to saucers, cough, or glance below
Seats for dropped gloves or cards. Humans, caught
On ground curiously neutral, homes and names
Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,
Some old, but most at that vague age that claims
The end of choice, the last of hope; and all

Here to confess that something has gone wrong.
It must be error of a serious sort,
For see how many floors it needs, how tall
It's grown by now, and how much money goes
In trying to correct it. See the time,
Half-past eleven on a working day,
And these picked out of it; see, as they c1imb

To their appointed levels, how their eyes
Go to each other, guessing; on the way
Someone's wheeled past, in washed-to-rags ward clothes:
They see him, too. They're quiet. To realise
This new thing held in common makes them quiet,
For past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those,
And more rooms yet, each one further off

And harder to return from; and who knows
Which he will see, and when? For the moment, wait,
Look down at the yard. Outside seems old enough:
Red brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking by it
Out to the car park, free. Then, past the gate,
Traffic; a locked church; short terraced streets
Where kids chalk games, and girls with hair-dos fetch

Their separates from the cleaners - O world,
Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch
Of any hand from here! And so, unreal
A touching dream to which we all are lulled
But wake from separately. In it, conceits
And self-protecting ignorance congeal
To carry life, collapsing only when

Called to these corridors (for now once more
The nurse beckons -). Each gets up and goes
At last. Some will be out by lunch, or four;
Others, not knowing it, have come to join
The unseen congregations whose white rows
Lie set apart above - women, men;
Old, young; crude facets of the only coin

This place accepts. All know they are going to die.
Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,
And somewhere like this. That is what it means,
This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend
The thought of dying, for unless its powers
Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes
The coming dark, though crowds each evening try

With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.