Modern Hospice Design: The Architecture of Palliative Care by Ken Worpole

Author:Ken Worpole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

This anti-institutional look and ethos is vital to a children’s hospice where, as staff told me, ‘We can’t pretend or want to take ownership of the child. We are here to fit in with the needs and timetables of the 190 or so families who at any one time want to use us in whatever way they need.’ An ability to come and go quietly and easily is crucial. Once beyond the reception area, however, the building opens out into an extensive suite of rooms and gardens, given added status by the fact that the hospice occupies a very large site with open views from its hillside location across to Belfast Lough.

By contrast, when approaching St Francis in Berkhamsted, most of the building can be seen directly from the front, as it presents its two-storey length, with entrance doors and canopy, chapel, wards, tower and wings in one elongated façade. There is a long circular access drive through landscaped gardens, and if anything the scale of the building – largely because the whole of the upper floor is devoted to administration and fund-raising – appears much larger than the services it provides, notably 14 bedrooms and a day hospice. A nursing home with 14 bedrooms would probably be only one-third of the size. To this extent, the hospice seems to be moving away from its cottage hospital scale or former family home origins towards becoming something like a stand-alone campus, and though it does not look like an institution in any way, it nevertheless appears to be much larger than its core functions would require.

This raises an interesting dilemma. Are the ‘back-office’ functions of administration, management and fund-raising, which today occupy increasing amounts of space in the building specification, now distorting the scale and intention of the original etho of hospice design? An initial answer to this would be to suggest that these back-office functions could be housed elsewhere more cheaply, without encroaching upon the core functions of hospice accommodation and care. Yet when this argument has been put to hospice managers, they point out that if you locate fund-raising away from the hospice itself, volunteers quickly lose motivation. They need to feel part of the hospice service directly, not be located at arm’s length. In a way, fund-raising and volunteering have to be seen, it is argued, as also being at the heart of the hospice service. So too must education, which now takes up a significant amount of space in any new hospice building, as they become centres for training volunteers or providing professional development courses for those already involved in palliative care.

One other interesting point of difference between the public face presented by Horizon House Children’s Hospice and St Francis in Berkhamsted relates to the positioning of the spiritual room or chapel element. Both have chosen small but distinctive brick or rendered towers to embody the space which can be used for sanctuary, prayer and on occasions the viewing of a body. (Frank Gehry’s design for Maggie’s Dundee also employs a two-storey tower element.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.