April 7 is World Health Day, an event instituted by the World Health Organization in 1950. The day is an opportunity to spread awareness on the issue of health through international, regional, as well as local events.
The day has never carried as much significance as it does this year, offering everyone a chance to reflect on their own role in the big picture. The pandemic has shown us how important it is to look after everyone’s health, especially those who are more vulnerable. To do this, we obviously need trained healthcare workers and increasingly sophisticated tools to deal with health crises quickly and efficiently. But protecting health also demands modern, flexible health facilities, equipped with the most advanced technologies for dealing with emergencies.
The slogan “Health above all” is also an excellent one for architecture, with the health facilities of tomorrow needing more than ever to make the wellbeing of users their absolute design priority.
Of course, health and wellbeing have been key elements of new architectural projects for some time. And for several years now, the Health category of THE PLAN AWARDS has attracted projects that have been able to completely rethink the design of healthcare facilities, producing architecture that helps makes patients’ hospital stay as pleasant as possible.
Register your project for THE PLAN AWARD 2021.
Check out the winning projects from past editions of THE PLAN AWARD.
So, to mark this year’s World Health Day, we’ve put together eight projects that prioritize the health and wellbeing of their users.
Maggie’s is a charity that provides support for people with cancer. Heatherwick Studio designed the UK’s 26th Maggie’s Centre on the campus of Europe’s largest teaching hospital, St. James’s University Hospital in Leeds. The new building, Maggie’s Leeds, was built on a grassy slope, close to an existing structure, taking advantage of the twenty foot (6m) drop of the site to provide visitors with views across the Yorkshire Dales.
Conceived by Archilinea and Binini Partners, and produced by Sistem Costruzioni, uSafe is a customizable modular building system designed to meet the most stringent health and safety regulations in all post-Covid-19 work environments.