Moshe Safdie stood up for the profession of architecture the other day, and, for having the guts, he needs to be thanked. He did what too many architects fear, or can't afford to do: He quit. He quit working on the master plan of the $1.6-billion McGill University Health Centre, a once-in-a-lifetime commission that would have returned the prodigal son to his hometown. Who could blame him? He was being treated like an ordinary schmo.
"When I was invited to come into this, there was a lot of bravado about ways to think about the hospital for the 21st century - five hospitals merged into one building," says Safdie, over the telephone during a stopover in Jerusalem. "That really excited me."
But engaging architects capable of the kind of clarity that Safdie recently displayed as design architect of the new Terminal 1 at Toronto's Pearson International Airport is becoming a rare reflex these days. Instead, architects are being asked to work as foot soldiers to major developer consortiums whose interest is turning an offshore profit, not inspiring human-based design.
Forget about capturing magical light, or weaving an interesting rhythm of built form along the street. Under the newly imposed regimes now taking Canada by storm, an architect's role is reduced to compiling binders full of bubble diagrams and measured distances between a nursing station and a patient's room. The stupidity is such that even Safdie was being asked to compile output specifications - not design.
Last year, 2.8 million Canadians were admitted to hospitals for an average of one week. What they experienced, for the most part, were factories built to contain the ill. A hospital that helps to heal through a gentle, meaningful design? Don't hold your breath - it's bad for you.
True, there are some exceptions, such as Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga, Ont., by Toronto-based Farrow Partnership, which welcomes visitors into a life-giving atrium of massive Douglas fir columns and beams that grow and spread through the space like a dense forest. Light wells are dropped through the space to help orient visitors and staff. And a discreet side entrance into the Carlo Fidani Peel Regional Cancer Centre allows patients to enter into the warm, spa-like radiation-treatment wing, or climb an elegant spiral staircase to the naturally lit chemotherapy floor.
Two small innovations speak volumes about the integrity of the design process when architects have the support of a trusting client: Rather than adopting a sprinkler system that uses ozone-depleting chemical agents, Farrow researched the light misting system used on cruise ships and, satisfying fire-code requirements, was able to install the HI-FOG misters into the hospital atrium. Another kind gesture has to do with wanting to eliminate the heavy steel doors that typically separate the radiation-treatment rooms - and the patient - from the rest of the world. Research revealed that radiation dissipates after a certain distance, so the architects designed an extra-long, wood-lined hall to allow the patient to travel seamlessly from the reassuring warmth of a spa-like waiting area into a treatment room.
There are important lessons here for all those government officials hungry for more private-consortium build-outs. Hospitals are, after all, about the people inside them. And the Credit Valley board understood that inherently. "Collectively, the citizens on the board were uniform in their decision to have a building that mattered," says Bart Wassmansdorf, chair of Credit Valley's building committee. He tells me this while sitting on a bench underneath the monumental curves of the wooden structural trees. Somebody with the waxy skin of a cancer patient is playing a glorious medley on the grand piano nearby. "We have a responsibility," says Wassmansdorf, "to treat public buildings as more than a big box."
And they did exactly that: building something that helps to heal from the moment you step inside, that returns you possibly to an optimistic state of mind, all accomplished for $10-million under budget, and on time. This year, Farrow's Credit Valley has won three major awards from health agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden. That's not surprising, but Canada should be producing plenty more of these stellar hospital designs.
Sadly, for the most part, inspired hospital design is wishful thinking. And with public-private partnerships - P3s - being heavily endorsed in Quebec, British Columbia and Ontario, the design of hospitals will become particularly unhealthy. Only cash-rich Alberta has rejected the private-consortium formula in favour of the construction-management way of getting infrastructure built. Maybe this is where the architects serious about designing healing hospitals will begin to flock.
