Cor Wagenaar, Noor Mens, Guru Manja, Colette Niemeijer, and Tom Guthknecht, Hospitals: A Design Manual (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2019), 50.
John Weeks and Gordon Best, “Design Strategy for Flexible Health Sciences Facilities,” Health Services Research 5, no. 3 (Fall 1970): 264.
Weeks and Best, “Design Strategy for Flexible Health Sciences Facilities,” 284.
John Weeks, “Indeterminate Architecture,” Transactions of the Bartlett Society 2 (1964).
Alistair Fair, “Modernization of Our Hospital System: The National Health Service, the Hospital Plan, and the Harness Programme, 1962–77,” Twentieth Century British History 29, no. 4 (December 2018).
William Fawcett, “Simulation: Tools for Planning for Change,” in Healthcare Architecture as Infrastructure, ed. Stephen H. Kendall (London: Routledge, 2018), 146-147.
Jane Smith, “Hospital Building in the NHS: Ideas and Designs II: Harness and Nucleus,” British Medical Journal 289 (December 1984).
At present, the planning and building of a typical city hospital takes around ten years, significantly longer than it took in 1950. At the same time, the lifecycle of medical equipment is getting shorter. According to the American Hospital Association’s inventory, the lifespan of anesthesia machines and patient-monitoring lifespan is seven years, that of CT scanners, MRI machines, and PET devices, five. This leads to a paradoxical situation; the newer a hospital is, the faster it will be out of date. While the Lariboisière Hospital in Paris built 1853 is still in use, Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, one of the iconic hospitals designed by Bertrand Goldberg, closed in 2011 (and was demolished in 2013), a mere 34 years after it was completed. Here are some further examples: Reid Memorial Hospital, Richmond, IN, 1905–2008 (103 years); Millard Fillmore Gates Circle Hospital, Buffalo, NY, 1911–2012 (101 years); Hôpital Bon-Secours, Metz, Germany, 1919–2012 (93 years); St. Joseph Hospital, Ottumwa, IA, 1926–2012 (86 years); Calgary General Hospital, Calgary, Canada,1910–1988 (78 years); Mt. Sinai Hospital, Philadelphia, PA, 1924–1997 (73 years); Hospital Pedro Borrás Cubanet, Havana, Cuba, 1934–1988 (54 years); St. Paul University Hospital, Dallas, TX, 1963–2015 (52 years); St. John General Hospital, New Brunswick, Canada,1931–1982 (51 years); Monsour Medical Center, Jeannette, PA, 1958–2006 (48 years); Ziekenhuis De Weezenlanden, Zwolle, Netherlands, 1972–2016 (44 years); Groot Ziekengasthuis, Den Bosch, Netherlands, 1974–2016 (42 years); Western Infirmary Hospital, Glasgow, Scotland, 1974–2015 (41 years); South Shore Hospital, Miami, FL, 1968–2006 (38 years); Prentice Women’s Hospital, Chicago, IL, 1975–2011 (36 years).
Agritecture LLC and WayBeyond Ltd, 2021 Global CEA Census Report (2021), ➝.
World Health Organization, “Health Workforce,” 2023, ➝.