This picture is from the presentation I attended at IMB/MOH focused on the new construction project in Butaro, Burera, Rwanda (Butaro Doctors’ Housing Sharehouse BDHS).
Two questions were asked during the presentation:
What Architecture Do You Need When Health Is a Human Right?
What Architecture Do We Need In The Movement Towards Health As a Human Right?
Architecture is a profession that is claimed to be only serving one group of people (the wealthy). If so, excluding a certain group of people, it is impossible to support health as a human right where everyone needs to be served. This is where our primary support resides: Designing for Everyone. Then how can we contribute to wellness using architecture?
Wellness is achieved when both the physiological and psychological needs of everyone are met. Physiological well-being for sick people is usually achieved through medication but psychological well-being is affected by the environment around the patient. As architects, we are mostly concerned by the quality of the space where health care services are delivered.
We need to create an environment that increases patient hope, that reduces stress for the ill, that increases patient satisfaction…we need to design a healing environment. This can be achieved through adequate noise control, air quality, thermal comfort, communication, color, texture and privacy but also by providing a view of the outdoors.
Let every architect offer healing spaces that will be used to provide adequate healthcare facilities for everyone, part of the movement towards health as a human right. Let’s all create healing architecture.
HEALING ARCHITECTURE:
Architecture which creates environments that are physically healthy and psychologically appropriate.