Project Description

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HEALING ENVIRONMENTS: CONVERGENCE OF BIOPHILIC DESIGN AND PATIENT RECOVERY​

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People crave nature. The connection to nature offers people a relationship between their surroundings and their health. Over the course of the history of the human race, people used nature and the environment around us as cues for shelter, food, water, and other important needs that we have. As time has passed and man has begun to take over the different realms of the world, there has been an evolution in this connection, with nature being taken away in order to develop large cities and infrastructure. But the connection to nature has never been completely diminished, as when people need to get away from the harsh realities and constant pressures of the real world, that’s when they turn to nature. When people go on vacations or travel around the world their destinations include beaches, lakes, woods, and other areas that act as a point of refuge - a place of healing. This desire to relocate to these locations offers great health benefits, such as reducing heart rate, improving diastolic blood pressure levels, and calming the body and soul.

 

This connection makes it seem tough to want to go back to the built world. The reasoning behind this connection is because in places of large amounts of steel, concrete, and brick, our only connection to such environments occurs through the windows and plants located around the building. In some cases, there aren’t even connections to nature available for our consumption. Instead, many of our environments have been wiped clean and sterilized, offering little benefits of maintaining or improving the health of the people that occupy those spaces. This is especially true of the places in which we need healing benefits the most – such as hospitals and healthcare facilities. Hospitals and other healthcare facilities are where humans can experience some of the most harmful and invasive surgeries and treatments, yet the only remedy that has been concocted to address human recovery and healing is the use of very addictive and dangerous opioids and narcotics. In order to combat this crisis, the architectural and medical professions are finally beginning to push towards a focus on creating healthier environments through the integration of biophilic design. Biophilic design offers the ability for our surrounding environments to reflect, mimic and even integrate nature back into our lives, creating not only spaces that humans can perform well in but also spaces that offer a multitude of health benefits.

 

The goal of this thesis inquiry is to push forward that research through the interrogation of shortcomings found in the current standards used to design state of the art hospital settings while also understanding how the patterns of biophilic design can help establish a new design framework for creating healthier hospital spaces. This new standard will ultimately be tested through the application of virtual reality (VR) and BIM software and reviewed by a collection of patients, doctors, and nurses in order to measure the overall effectiveness of this new design standard aimed at improving patient recovery. 

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Further details of this thesis inquiry can be reviewed at: