HOSPITAL OF THE FUTURE
GAMZE YESILDAG
“Hospital of the future” is a visual manifesto that questions the process of hospitals and healthcare designs from the past to the present.
The research project, led by Reinier de Graaf of OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), one of the world-renowned architectural offices, examines the role of diseases in urban planning and brings a perspective on the future and asks questions about what health spaces can turn into with their current state within the scope of COVID-19.
The film, made within the scope of the ‘Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales’ exhibition, which includes the personal speculations and suggestions of twelve international teams of artists and architects on urban possibilities, shows that health and hospitals are not only a matter of architecture; underlines that it is a much broader topic included in urbanization and urban life.
From film content:
“Life expectancy is getting longer, there are no more outbreaks and people are not dying from infectious diseases. Prosperity is more of a marketable concept than health, and it is creating its own sector and increasingly diversifying. Spatial studies are being carried out to increase patients ‘ recovery rates and reduce hospital stays. So are we really healthy? Does our health stand still while our life expectancy is extended?
It is at this point that a pandemic arises.
What is called the new normal will begin after the actual process is completely over, but how new is this normal or how normal is it?
In the Middle Ages, the walls built to prevent epidemics from entering cities or spreading where they appeared firstt made it difficult for the disease to disappear. In Europe, cities have always been the center of epidemics. The Industrial Revolution and industrial cities became the outlet for diseases. After the city of Hygeia, which was not built, many sterile city models were produced and built. These cities, designed as people flocked to cities with large ships and planes, could not end anything.
The Spanish flu completely changed the functioning of medical institutions, and scientists became heroes. At that time, architects also became bureaucrats, producing more functional, more efficient and larger hospitals. But the life and duration of the buildings began to become shorter and shorter, they could not keep up with the change, so much so that some large hospitals became dysfunctional before they began to be used.
Now that the hospitals we know are dead, there’s only one unit left: the bed. From the size of the room required for the functioning of this single bed to the tools, from the places to be tested to the energy to be used, to the arable soil, the area required is 2190 m2. The hospital of the future must be flexible enough to keep up with each situation, like a theater scene. In an era when organs are made in 3-D printers, why not build hospitals like that? Hospitals that rebuild themselves from their own waste will also produce their own medicines like a greenhouse. We do not have to go to the hospital of the future because it will be able to create an order, process it remotely like a logistics center, and perform operations remotely with the data it has at hand. Health will become an omnipresent constellation. In the hospital of the future, the machines will take on all the routine work that the employees will do, and all the sensitive work will be left in the sharp hands of the machines. Could the hospital of the future automatically become more humane?
