There's something about hospitals that emit an atmosphere of sterility, where everything from their white walls to the squeaky clean tiles can smother the soul. The Scientific American spells out what we all know to be true: hospitals are stressful places. Given that the brain is the central system that signals when to produce antigens to help the body heal, it is in the patient's best interest to have their brain optimised when recovering.
Enter Mother Nature in the bleak horizon of antiseptic white walls, particularly that of Darul Ehsan Medical Center in Malaysia.
On the second floor of this hospital, one will see an open rooftop courtyard with pebbled floors, furniture that respects the tropical culture of this country, and lush greenery that gives patients a break from the indoor world of medicine. This space, although not necessarily the creme de la creme of hospital public spaces, is comfortable and invigorating.
Malaysia's hot climate requires some technique of cooling an area down, and what other way to best do this outdoors other than incorporating a water feature? A+ for the aesthetic.
The furniture complements the overall aesthetic; wooden chairs incorporate for a warmer feel to the space, and blue umbrellas revitalise the space with some colour, while providing much needed shade in their entirely open space. The tilework could (and perhaps should) have been replaced with grass.
It gives the patients a breather [pun intended] from the mechanical feel inside this hospital, as it allows them to interact with a wider demographic of patients. The elderly can interact with infants, with people outside of their circle of curers, people who don't pity them, but just want to know them. Patient's relatives can relax here. In the past, mother/baby expositions have been held here, and so we can see that this space facilitates community development, arguably achieving social sustainability. Lounges and cheap malaysian cuisine borders this area and stimulates some circulation of leisure money, a secondary form of income for the hospital that also creates a few jobs outside of the medical field here.
Unfortunately, what this space particularly fails at is the environmental pillar of sustainability. Though there was planty (2nd pun) of opportunity to integrate a greener environment to the space, such as a grassy floor with a stone path that would have benefited the hospital during monsoon season (via stormwater management), they instead chose to use an impervious pebbly surface that is particularly harsh to patients who are vulnerable and can fall. Although the potted plants are diverse, there are but a few of them, and they lack cohesive design - the vegetation used is so random, that it weakens the general motif to this public space and fails to give this space its character. This is a shame, for Malaysia usually uses every design opportunity it has to integrate vegetation...even if it is sometimes at an expense to the user's convenience (bad pedestrian paths! But that's for another post).
Integrating extensive rooftop garden techniques to this space might be the solution to making it more sustainable; it is a shame that this hospital chose not to integrate more greenery into this space, especially given that nature helps heal. The constraints it most likely faced was the cost of installing and maintaining these plants. Though considering that nature helps patients heal faster...is this really a cost in the long run?
Tabinda Shah
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