Healthcare Property: Salutogenesis, Lighting, and Healthcare Design
View of the terraced atrium, elliptical garden, and central skylight at the “Butterfly” Helmsley Cancer Centre
“We need to start viewing architecture, not by what it is, but what it does and what it can do is its ability to cause health.”
Founding architect, Tye Farrow, comments on the role of light in healthcare environments in recent article by Healthcare Property. Leading healthcare designers met to consider the provision of supportive architecture in roundtable discussion organised by lighting specialists, Atrium.
A salutogenic approach, or that which causes health, places an emphasis on healing and wellbeing. As quoted in the Healthcare Property article, Tye Farrow argues that “We need to start viewing architecture, not by what it is, but what it does and what it can do is its ability to cause health.”
Garden skylight and timber fins over the elliptical garden at the “Butterfly” Helmsley Cancer Centre
An example of supportive and salutogenic space achieved through lighting, lies between the wings of the ‘Butterfly” Helmsley Cancer Centre. A 79-foot-long (24-meter-long) central steel skylight (pictured) unites the winged roof, letting light into several terraced interior courtyard gardens cascading through the building. The lower-most interior courtyard is moody and emotional as the light filters down 5 stories to the elliptical garden and onto the layered timber. The effect communicates the message that we are alive and that life is full of hope, despite the current obstacles in front of us.
Read the full article and Tye Farrow’s comments on salutogenesis in healthcare design, here.