bring hospital to you

Studio Theodore Spyropoulos

Tutors Mostafa El-Sayed, Apostolos Despotidis

Team Haoyang Shi, Zhengze Yu, Yi Han

Bringing the Hospital to You is a highly adaptive and decentralised architectural system and a manifesto. We believe that the modern healthcare system is abstract and inhuman and is not able to deal with medical emergencies practically or culturally. As Susan Sontag mentions “Illness is the night-side of life”: illness should be considered as a natural part of our everyday lives. But reality is quite the opposite. People more willingly treat illnesses as metaphors that expel patients from society. And the contemporary design of hospitals in fact enhances this kind of alienation. The architecture of modern hospitals reflects the idea of the panopticon, the paradigmatic diagram of surveillance and management. This traditional centralised medical system has proven to fail to deal with the complexities of the real world, especially during the current global pandemic. On the contrary, the treatment process is in fact decentralised and requires an elevated level of communication and collaboration between different health care practitioners and medical devices.

Thus, in order to provide a more humanitarian and efficient medical system that covers the complexity of people’s needs, our architecture aims to extract the decentralised system of the treatment process from the centralised hospital design and directly distribute any healthcare provisions to all with the use of artificial intelligence and real-time communication. In other words, our proposal is about Bringing the Hospital to You. Multiple units embedded with real-time distributed and self-organisation systems will transport and distribute medical devices and supplies around the city and perform different tasks that are tailored to individual patients. By assisting and augmenting the existing healthcare system, the architecture system of Bringing the Hospital to You provides the opportunity to open up a new world of health care provision that is much more humane and personalised to patient care.