Just as there are architectural typologies that have been evolving due to more artistic and conceptual issues, Hospital Building Design has always undergone typological changes for reasons that are outside the architectural concept itself.
It has been moved by ‘revolutionary’ factors stemming from social or scientific modifications. Briefly seeing how hospital architecture has evolved throughout history with the help of Hospital Architects in India allows us to understand how it works and what we should expect from it.
Hospitals have evolved only slightly in recent years, never radically. In the last century, hospitals were healing machines that took the form of very compact buildings with poorly organized circulations, little ventilation, and little natural lighting. This is how most hospitals are today: they are about 70 years old, old, and very tall. And although they can work well, they often lead to problems of size, distribution, or rooms.
To overcome these problems, hospital architecture must be revolutionized again. The hospital must be designed with the latest parameters of universal accessibility and the highest standards that exist today to be completely inclusive.
A hospital that is a paradigm of universal accessibility will be a hospital for everyone: its design must allow all users to access and use the building autonomously, without any barriers, impediments, or dangers.
In order to apply universal accessibility measures, it is essential to know the different needs that users have when interacting with architecture.
Clear Code Architecture
The method allows knowing the level of accessibility of a space or group of spaces and proposing actions that help improve it to an optimal level.
– The use of healthy materials and the design of work environments that positively affect people’s health, overcoming low-performance materials and workspaces.
We must begin to think that materials are not simply cladding elements that give an image to a hospital or other building, but that they can actively participate in people’s health.
– Parametric design to guarantee typological hyper flexibility. In other words, it is the search for an optimal model that can be adapted to all cases, based on a series of rules, metrics, and strategies common to all health facilities to guarantee their correct operation, whatever the final particular characteristics may be.
In addition, the parameters must also allow the customization of the building from the beginning, as well as the adaptation to future changes.
– The intelligent hospital, a fusion of big data and artificial intelligence that will be able to process 50 or 60 years of treatments in all hospitals to personalize the most efficient treatments, surpassing the emergence of ICTs and current Big Data.
We have to generate again the concept of a revolution in the hospital model to move on to what is already happening in large R&D companies: the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Thus, we will be able to process all the data generated by the hospital infrastructure and draw conclusions from Artificial Intelligence.
– The cyborg hospital as an evolution of the technological hospital, in which new technologies will be merged with materials and integrated into the new generation construction systems to interact and boost the efficiency of the new work environments, in addition to the experience and user trust.
This evolution will allow the collaborative work of doctors, nurses, and biomechanical engineers in hospitals built and designed as optimal containers for these new technologies.