Sustainable Hospital Architecture: Quality Principles for a Responsable Design

Abstract

The theme of sustainability in the hospital design is today a subject widely discussed in the architectural field. The functioning of the health facility, also under the point of view of physical and organizational consistency is one of the primary objectives of the national government. There is the urgency to answer adequately and responsibly for the needs of society, assuring physical and psychological comfort and putting the center of the design process the individual sanitary needs. The social transformations and the technological progress in sanitary field have considerably modified the hospital conception. The hospital becomes space in which the individual is revalued for him itself and for the interaction with other individuals, with the environment, with the equipments and activities. From neutral envelope, aseptic and emarginating, the hospital space therefore becomes relation and meeting space. Factors not easily schematizeable contribute to defining of the quality of the space in terms of humanization. The attention towards the "affective" charge of users and operators, towards the complexity of their relationship: the atmosphere, the sensations which the space causes, the behaviours and the people's expectations. Starting from the hospital concept evolution and from the analysis of the implied problems in the programming and management also of the rules health, the paper synthetically intends to define the tipological and technological quality principles basic to the design process, aimed at an hospital architecture responsible and sustainable.