About the Book
Health and Architecture offers a uniquely global overview of the healthcare facility in the pre-modern era, engaging in a cross-cultural analysis of the architectural response to medical developments and the formation of specialized hospitals as an independent building typology.
Whether constructed as part of Chinese palaces in the 15th century or the religious complexes in 16th century Ottoman Istanbul, the healthcare facility throughout history is a built environment intended to promote healing and caring. The essays in this volume address how the relationships between architectural forms associated with healthcare and other buildings in the pre-modern era, such as bathhouses, almshouses, schools and places of worship, reflect changing attitudes towards healing. They explore the impact of medical advances on the design of hospitals across various times and geographies, and examine the historic construction processes and the stylistic connections between places of care and other building types, and their development in urban context.
Deploying new methodological, interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to the analysis of healthcare facilities, Health and Architecture demonstrates how the spaces of healthcare themselves offer some of the most powerful and practical articulations of therapy.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Preface
1. Places of Care and Healing: Context, Design, and Development in History, Mohammad Gharipour (Morgan State University, USA)
Part One - Religiosity: Healthcare in Religious Context
2. The Hospital Design in History: The Dichotomy of Religious and Secular Contexts, Guenter B. Risse (University of Washington, USA)
3. A Plan for the King and the Sick: Portuguese Hospital Architecture during the Age of Exploration, Danielle Abdon (Temple University, USA)
4. Healing of the Poor: The Hospital of Our Lady of Potterie in Bruges and the Miracle Book (1520–21), Miyako Sugiyama (Independent Scholar, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Japan)
5. ‘The Love of Friends Made This in the Cause of Humanity’: Therapeutic Environment in Quaker Asylum Design at the York Retreat, Ann-Marie Akehurst (Independent Scholar, Royal Institute of British Architects, UK)
Part Two - Polity: Public Health and Politics
6. Dar al-Shifa’ or Bimaristan: Islamic Hospitals of Damascus, Sivas, and Cairo in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Richard McClary (York University, UK)
7. The Body of the City: Medicine and Urban Renewal in Sixtus IV’s Rome, Johanna Heinrichs (University of Kentucky, USA)
8. Spaces of Healing in Early Modern Portuguese Empire: Changing Public Health and Hospital Buildings on Mozambique Island, Eugénia Rodrigues (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
9. From Exigency to Civic Pride: The Development of Early Australian Hospitals, Julie Willis (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Part Three - Typologies: Places of Health in History
10. Misericórdias: Healthcare and Welfare Architecture in Sixteenth-Century Portugal, Joana Pinho (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
11. Making the Home a Healing Space: Self-cultivating Practices in Early Modern China, Ying Zhang (Hunan University, China)
12. For Care and Salvation: Leprosy Hostels in Pre-Modern Japan, circa 1200–1800, Susan L. Burns (University of Chicago, USA)
13. Purity and Progress: The First Maternity Hospitals in the United States, Jhennifer Amundson (Belmont University, USA)
Part Four - Architecture: Designing Spaces of Healing
14. Health as Harmony: The Pellegrinaio Cycle of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, Margaret Bell (Independent Scholar, Norton Simon Museum of Art, USA)
15. Uterus House: Incubating Obstetrics in Early Modern Bologna, Kim Sexton (University of Arkansas, USA)
16. Healing by Design: An Experiential Approach to Early Modern Ottoman Hospital Architecture, Nina Macaraig (Koç University, Turkey)
17. Architectural Prescriptions: Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Shift from the Pre-Modern to the Modern Hospital, Stuart Bill Leslie (John Hopkins University, USA)
Bibliographies
Index
About the Author :
Mohammad Gharipour is Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University in Baltimore, USA. His other publications include Social Housing in the Middle East (co-edited with Kivanc Kilinc, 2019), The Historiography of Persian Architecture (2015) and Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in In Poetry, Arts and History (I.B. Tauris, 2013).
Review :
Health and Architecture synthesizes new scholarship on structures and functions of healing spaces across an impressive geographic range from antiquity to the present. The four themes of religiosity, polity, typology, and design structure the seventeen contributors’ diverse explorations of healthcare from within homes to hospitals.
In the wake of the global pandemic, Health and Architecture offers a collection of timely and far-reaching essays. Valuable for teachers and essential for scholars, this selection of carefully researched articles on architecture and medicine will spark conversations and catalyze research for decades to come.
