"Where are the architects?" Paul said.If hospitals are making people sicker,where are the architects and designers to help us build and design hospitals that allow us to heal?That following summer, I was in the back of a Land Rover with a few classmates,bumping over the mountainous hillside of Rwanda.For the next year, I'd be living in Butaro in this old guesthouse, which was a jail after the genocide.I was there to design and build a new type of hospital with Dr. Farmer and his team.If hallways are making patients sicker,what if we could design a hospital that flips the hallways on the outside, and makes people walk in the exterior?If mechanical systems rarely work, what if we could design a hospitalthat could breathe through natural ventilation, and meanwhile reduce its environmental footprint?And what about the patients' experience?Evidence shows that a simple view of nature can radically improve health outcomes.So why couldn't we design a hospital where every patient had a window with a view?Simple, site-specific designs can make a hospital that heals.Designing it is one thing; getting it built, we learned, is quite another.
