Anand Swaminathan
Immersing people in the natural environment would improve their wellbeing. While we referred to this as a BIOPHILIC DESIGN
Deprival of nature and surrounded only with concrete walls, humans exhibit pathological symptoms. The sick building syndrome (SBS) is used to describe at situation where occupants of a building experience acute health- or comfort-related effects that seem to be linked directly to the time spent in the building. This further strengthened the case for augmenting the hospital’s-built environment with flora and fauna.
With the validation of scientific research, biophilic design has become an increasingly relevant theme in sustainable architectural design.
Biophilic Design
Biophilic design can be organized into three categories –
Nature in the Space,
Natural Analogues, and
Nature of the Space
providing a framework for understanding and enabling thoughtful incorporation of a rich diversity of strategies into the built environment.
Seeking Sustainability
Sustainability entails minimizing our impact on the environment at the organizational and individual levels. In hospitals, we have to sought to do this through our Architecture, landscaping, place making, waste management policies and green culture building.
Why should Hospitals care for the Environment.?
Environmental health affects public health. While this connection is most evident in regions of the world that have suffered extreme environment pollution, similar effects are increasingly affecting the larger metropolitan population as well.
As the effects of climate change accelerate, we are beginning to see that the threat to the human life
extends far beyond rising sea levels. Scientists have begun to draw a connection between rising temperatures and more aggressive diseases like Swine flu, Covid- 19 etc. The heat has even proven fatal in recent years and meteorologists predict the temperatures could reach easily up to 42 -45-degree Celsius.
It is conceptualised that the hospital could be more than just a building. For medical treatments. They strived to make it a healing environment as well, one that could positively stimulate the senses of sight, scent, sound and touch to facilitate recuperation. Recent research had further affirmed the therapeutic benefits that greenery could have on patients, encouraging the team to pursue their vision of building a “Hospital in a Garden” that could achieve operational sustainability and Patients experience through carefully planned landscaping.
