CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/15/2021

The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity

Featured image, of a patient ward at Butaro District Hospital, Rwanda, is reproduced from The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity, the highly anticipated new release by MASS Design founder Michael P. Murphy Jr. with the help of Jeffrey Mansfield and MASS Design Group. A fascinating, super-relevant history of the design and life of hospitals, this copiously illustrated 256-page hardcover is published to accompany the anticipated blockbuster exhibition Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics opening December 10 at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. Murphy writes, “Hospital architecture illustrates the contradiction in nearly all public built spaces: the tension between an imagined population that will need public services—charity—and the systems’ overt need to shape that public’s behavior so its members may attain it—control. The principles of charity and control pertain to architecture more broadly, but they were birthed in the clinic, and they can never be disentangled from the spaces of medical treatment. They help shape our understanding of architecture’s ambivalence toward its public role and clarify that—whether we acknowledge it or not—buildings can determine our behavior as individuals and advance our rights as members of a society.”