Does hospital architecture make us feel welcome?

Lim Yeong-hwan 

The author is the dean of Hongik University's Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design and a professor of architecture.

The first building we encounter in life is a hospital. That was true for the 254,500 babies born in Korea last year, an increase for the second consecutive year. What kind of space greeted them as they entered the world?

Hospitals witness our first cries, treat illness and help us recover. Sometimes they are where we say goodbye to loved ones. Few buildings accompany so many defining moments of life. Yet we rarely consider what hospitals should look and feel like.

Enter a general hospital and a vast atrium and imposing lobby await. Registration and payment counters are marked. Like airports or railway stations, these spaces accommodate crowds and move them efficiently. Given the patients, families and medical services concentrated there, their scale is understandable. They also advertise the sophistication of modern medicine.

But visitors arrive with different emotions. Expectant mothers feel anticipation and fear. Patients awaiting test results are anxious. Even healthy people can feel vulnerable in hospitals. How much comfort does architectural grandeur offer them?

Several years ago, I visited Rehab Basel, a rehabilitation hospital in Switzerland designed by Herzog & de Meuron. It looked nothing like the hospitals I knew. Beyond its low roof stretched a lawn dotted with trees. Patients and relatives talked on benches. Light filtered through horizontal wooden louvers, while glass walls connected interior spaces with gardens.

It was difficult to believe the architects had also designed Seoul's ST SongEun Building, a sharply angular concrete structure on Dosan-daero. Rehab Basel felt more like a park or village courtyard than a hospital.

Most striking was the absence of intimidation. The architecture seemed intended to preserve ordinary routines: looking into a garden, enjoying sunshine or sitting with someone for a conversation. Activities easily taken for granted in good health remained part of everyday life.

Was this possible only because it was a rehabilitation hospital? I recalled walking along Barcelona's beachfront promenade more than a decade ago. Beside the palm-lined path stood a long, two-story building whose glass facade blended into its surroundings. I initially failed to recognize it as Hospital del Mar, one of Barcelona's principal public general hospitals.

A taller ward tower rose behind it, but the waterfront frontage remained low and approachable. Inside were lawns and shaded places where people gathered. Though larger than Rehab Basel, the hospital offered similar intimacy. Its designers had not reduced its scale; they had changed how that scale met the city.

More than six decades ago, Le Corbusier explored a similar idea. His unbuilt Venice Hospital proposal, which I once examined in a research paper, sought to make a hospital part of the city. Its low, horizontal layout respected Venice's prevailing building heights and repeated spaces resembling its narrow streets and small squares.

Courtyards and rooftop gardens punctuated the complex. Corridors and ramps would allow patients to encounter sunlight, trees and outdoor views. Nature was not merely scenery to observe but part of daily hospital life.

Of course, not every hospital can spread across a low-rise site. Expensive land and dense cities often demand towers. Concentrated facilities can also speed emergency treatment and improve staff efficiency. Yet Barcelona demonstrates that building height need not dictate the scale patients experience.

Ward towers can stand farther back, with entrances kept closer to street level. Waiting areas can become smaller, more personal spaces beside sunny gardens or courtyards. Even a large lobby need not feel like a station concourse.

We usually judge hospitals by their doctors, advanced equipment and bed capacity. Saving lives is their purpose. But waiting for treatment, recovering and spending final moments with family are also parts of patients' lives. Architecture shapes those experiences and affects physical and emotional well-being.

More than 40 years ago, research found that patients with views of trees recovered faster than those facing a wall. If hospitals considered each person's time as carefully as their bed counts, their design might change.

If a hospital is the first architecture we encounter, should its first impression not be welcome rather than grandeur? Basel and Barcelona remain memorable not because their hospitals looked unlike hospitals, but because human scale came before monumental size. A good hospital lets people forget, if only briefly, how large it is.