Healthcare Architecture in an Era of Radical Transformation

Book excerpt: In the 1960s and 1970s large, high-technology, inpatient oriented hospitals reflected the central role of such facilities in an expanding healthcare system. But hospital architecture and the healthcare system have vastly changed since then, in profound and unpredicted ways. This book explores for the first time how and why acute care hospitals and the often related psychiatric facilities, retirement communities, and community clinics have been transformed during the final decades of the twentieth century. The authors also consider utopian visions of unbuilt work and look ahead to the possible healthcare landscape of the future: "health villages," home-based care for the aging and aged population, and cyberclinics and virtual hospitals.