Benefits of Hospital Gardens

Indoor hospital garden in West London designed to help patients with recovery

In 1984, Roger Ulrich, now a professor of architecture as well as a co-founding director of the Centre for Health Systems and Design at Texas A&M University, reported that post-surgery patients recovered 8.5 percent faster in rooms where the window allowed the view of a tree.

More recent research into the benefits of hospital gardens shows that even such small natural areas help reduce stress levels of both the patients and the staff, as well as encouraging patients’ recovery via their own strength and will power. It been suggested that exposure to nature helps reduce experiences of pain, even a bedside picture depicting a natural scene having a notable effect on the patient.

In a physiological and psychological context, being in an arboretum for fifty minutes is said to provide cognitive benefits for people suffering from depression. Walking in nature, or even viewing nature, improves the capacity to direct and restore attention, a result observed in patients confronting certain clinical situations, such as newly diagnosed breast cancer.

(Cooper, M. C., 2005: Healing Gardens in Hospitals, The Interdisciplinary Design and Research e- Publication, 1(1), 1-27. cabeurl.com/6w)

This seems to indicate that our relationship and interaction with nature can be critical in terms of the impact it can have on our lives. Perhaps more everyday, contemporary interiors (libraries, waiting rooms, offices etc.) should be designed with a higher focus on the amount of nature that penetrates its’ walls, since the benefits of being in proximity to nature are clear.

Rebecca Louise Law

Rebecca Louise Law is a British Installation Artist, best known for artworks created with natural materials, namely flora. The physicality and sensuality of her work plays with the relationship between humanity and nature. Law is passionate about natural change and preservation, allowing her work to evolve as nature takes its course and offering an alternative concept of beauty.

Her work is very much site-specific, with each installation tailored to the environment it is presented in.

Life in Death (Kew Gardens, 2018):

The exhibition Life in Death showcases her personal collection of plants and flowers, dried and preserved over a six year period. It is her most intricate large-scale artwork to date and examines our relationship with flowers and plants and how they are used, particularly through rituals. Kew’s Herbarium specimens, including Egyptian garlands made with dried flowers dating back to 700BC, which inspired Rebecca to make this work, are also on display. I like that the work is interactive, with the audience being able to touch it and walk right through and become immersed in this world she has created.

Outside: In (Times Square, 2015):

This work in particular closely relates to my own. She speaks about wanting to bring the freedom of childhood and natural tranquillity into urban spaces by bringing nature in, hence the title of the installation. I have also read about her very detailed processes in how she picks the flowers (in this instance ones that dry the best) and how she treats them, which is very similar to my own process in that it is almost a mixture between a science experiment and art.

Bruce Munro

British artist Bruce Munro is best known for immersive large-scale light-based installations inspired largely by his interest in shared human experience.

CDSea (Long Knoll Field in Wiltshire, 2010):

Munro has laid out the CDs to mimic the bright reflective quality of the sea with the sun shining onto it. His work relates to my concept as he achieves the same outcome by doing the exact opposite: merging in and out by taking the inside out, but making it fit in as though it naturally belonged there.

Field of Light (Uluru, 2016):

Field of Light (Hermitage Museum and Gardens, Norfolk, Virginia, USA 2014 ):

In 1992, journeying to Uluru through the Red Desert in central Australia, Munro felt a compelling connection to the energy, heat and brightness of the desert landscape, which he recorded in his ever present sketchbooks. Field of Light is the embodiment of this experience. Munro recalls “I wanted to create an illuminated field of stems that, like the dormant seed in a dry desert, would burst into bloom at dusk with gentle rhythms of light under a blazing blanket of stars”. Having developed the idea for over a decade the first Field of Light was created in the field behind his family home in Wiltshire.

This correlates with my concept of merging the ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ as Munro essentially brings the inside out, in a way that works in harmony with the existing environment, much like I am bringing the outside in by planting flowers in the studio in a way that works with the existing structure.

Capturing the Daylight Dividend in Buildings: How and Why?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013230200118X

An article focusing on the importance of incorporating natural daylight into contemporary architecture.

Scientists at the Lighting Research Centre in New York have reported that day-lit environments increase occupant productivity and comfort and provide the mental and visual stimulation necessary to regulate human circadian rhythms. For example, a person is much more likely to feel emotionally stable and satisfied in a brightly lit, open space than a prison cell. Dark spaces often make us feel lost or trapped, both physically and psychologically.

Such research suggests that incorporating natural elements into human construction is extremely important for daily psychological and physiological needs, and that the idea of merging the ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ can be very important mental function and well-being.

William McDonough & Michael Braungart: Buildings Like Trees, Cities Like Forests (2002)

But what if buildings were alive? What if our homes and workplaces were like trees, living organisms participating productively in their surroundings? Imagine a building, enmeshed in the landscape, that harvests the energy of the sun, sequesters carbon and makes oxygen.

The paper discusses the benefits of architecture being designed so that it works in conjunction with nature, rather than on a completely separate tangent or even against it. Again, I think that this core concept in architectural philosophy is much more preferable to humans destroying in order to build, if not necessary to contemporary design.

Le Corbusier’s Maison Curutchet

Maison Curutchet was built by the Swiss-French architect for De Pedro Domingo Curutchet. Located in La Plata, Argentina, the house is attached to an existing structure and designed to respond to its historic context – a rarity among the Modernist’s projects.

A tree planted on the ground floor grows up through the building, its canopy adding more greenery to a terrace garden on an upper storey.

Rather than cutting the tree down and building right over it as is the norm, the building was design to not only make room for the tree but so that it works with the structure (the canopy being a part of the terrace garden).

I think that we should consider the environment more when constructing, and not just on an ethical basis. We work so hard to shut the outside out, and then cut down flowers and bring them in to decorate our rooms in a nice controlled manner. Why? There must be a way of merging the outside and inside, rather than transporting elements of one into the other. Nature is often unpredictable and should be allowed to evolve without interference.

Liminal Spaces

The word liminal comes from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold – any point or place of entering or beginning. A liminal space is the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’ It is a place of transition, waiting, and not knowing. Liminal space is where all transformation takes place, if we learn to wait and let it form us. An in between space to bring together two different aspects or elements of life.

 

Pierre Huyghe

About three years ago, discussing what he planned next for his practice, Pierre Huyghe told me that he was on the hunt for a place “to grow the work to the condition I want it to grow,” perhaps a stretch of land or an old building, somewhere maybe a bit off the beaten path. “The museum is a place of separation, in a certain way, and I need a place of continuity,” he said. “That’s why I need that site—whatever that site is.”

Huyghe has transformed that abandoned rink into one of the most formidable and mysterious artworks ever; an alien environment that seems secretly to teem with life and that operates according to its own furtive schedule. The concrete floor of the rink has been sliced apart and the ground dug up so that visitors can descend along clay pathways that are interrupted by pools of water harbouring algae. Just when you begin to get your bearings, a buzzing sound emanates from up above and sleek panels glide open from the otherwise decrepit ceiling, exposing the room to the elements.

Huyghe has transformed an inside space into an outside environment or landscape. I am especially interested in his concept of growing his work to where he wants it to be, rather than directly arranging and orchestrating every element. Growth seems much less controlled and more natural.

Olafur Eliasson

 

The Weather Project, 2003

In this installation, representations of the sun and sky dominate the expanse of the Turbine Hall. A fine mist permeates the space, as if creeping in from the environment outside. Eliasson appears to have not only transported the physical qualities of being outside into the gallery, but also the general atmosphere of being surrounded by a sunset, the contemplative emotional state that comes with it.

While still clearly within the interior of the gallery, the audience is allowed to travel past the walls, or is allowed to ignore them. The walls dividing the inside from the outside become essentially pointless, the two planes merging.

Riverbed, 2014-15

Beauty. 1993

Project Under Pohutukawa

Upon further research I have discovered that embracing the physical form of natural structures continued into contemporary architectural design.

‘Under Pohutukawa’ is a house designed by Herbst Architects and constructed in the early 2010s, and although since Gaudi’s time technology and materials have advanced immeasurably, a key feature of this 21^st century house are the branch like supports bearing the weight of the glass ceiling reminiscent of those in the Sagrada Familia, intended to bring the interior and the surrounding forest closer both in terms of visual and mental impact.

http://herbstarchitects.co.nz/projects/under-pohutukawa.