Russian hospitalITY. Strategies for hospital flexibility in urban context

The aim of this thesis is to analyze capacity of modern hospital, its supplies and demands within urban context. Health care design went through long history in its changes and transformations. Different ages considered place of the hospital within the city in different ways. While in some periods of time, such as Enlightenment, hospital was one of the central and most important facilities in the urban tissue, other ages considered hospital just as utilitarian function, as a machine for patient recovery (Cor Wagenaar, 2006). Today healthcare design practitioners and theoreticians try to combine most advantageous technologies with spatial quality of hospital in order to bring back phenomenon of healing environment which is made by spatial organization of hospital layout. Modern healthcare technologies play crucial role in recovery process and their rapid development affects hospital in many ways. That is why flexibility, or, in other words, ability of hospital to adapt to these changes, becomes one of the main demands in modern healthcare design. First chapter of the thesis is dedicated to the short overview of flexibility as theoretical approach and underlines its main characteristic features. Second chapter introduces urban context of the area which was chosen for application of modern and flexible healthcare design principles. The area is Russian city of Pensa, situated 600 kilometers from Moscow which represents typical provincial Russian city requires renovation of healthcare facilities. Third chapter explains in details all aspects of flexibility which were used in this renovation project and shows realization of flexible hospital complex in a bottom-up approach. Fourth and last chapter, modern trends in healthcare design, goes deep in details of different design solutions applied to this design project considering patients, caregivers and visitors as three main groups of hospital users. Special needs of each of these groups as well as their interaction with each other are described in details in this chapter. Thesis ends with the assessment table where different aspects of flexibility are summarized and assessed based on delivered project.