Designing for People.

I’ve been ruminating a lot lately on the nature of modern hospitals. The Royal Derby is a big, modern monobloc building contained within a shallow depression in the landscape, and the view of it as you come down the hill has an air of some technological behemoth waiting to swallow you. And the view from the inside goes some way to vindicating the simile.

My recollection of older hospitals I visited as a child is quite different. Admittedly, the view from the outside was a little dour – as you would expect of the functional side of mostly Victorian architecture – and there was a clinical feel about the interior. And yet there was also a certain cosiness about them, something human, something not entirely un-homely.

There’s nothing human or remotely cosy about the Royal Derby, and I expect the same is true of all modern hospitals where the emphasis is almost exclusively on clinical exigency.

It goes without saying that I am grateful for such places. We’re very lucky in Britain to have them available free to everyone on the National Health Service. But I still have to wonder whether a slight change in the approach to their design might produce a place in which there is an atmosphere of care and healing, rather than the feeling that you’re trapped in a soulless processing centre. Maybe most people don’t care about such matters, but people like me do.