Breath – what is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of it? Nature, the feeling when fresh air flows into the lungs, a clear blue sky and letting your gaze wander to the horizon? Perhaps you feel liberated and weightless the longer you open yourself to the impressions of nature.
In today’s world, this feeling of being free in a natural environment is often becoming harder and harder to achieve. Unfortunately, the health sector is not yet the first place where one would expect a relaxed and calming atmosphere connected to nature. But here it seems even more important to connect with nature on closer inspection.
Two years of pandemics and the strong push towards digitalization have accelerated the metamorphosis process of the modern hospital of tomorrow to a more compassionate model of treatment and care. The focus has shifted to reducing the stressful environment and situations experienced by patients and healthcare workers by improving the perceived quality of the environment.
“We are currently experiencing momentous change. The approach to designing healthcare environments can no longer be based only on treating the illness, it must be driven by an interest in improving the conditions of patients and staff through the design of the care and treatment areas.“
Davide Campari, General Manager, Medical Systems division, Fujifilm Italy
Fujifilm is aware of this importance and, at Fuorisalone in Milan, is underlining its vocation as a company that pays attention to the patient. Due to developments in the healthcare sector, Fujifilm Italia has teamed up with Filippo Taidelli, an architect who has always worked on healthcare projects. He heads a design thinktank that involves designers and artists with particular skills in the humanization of space to develop the “Breath” concept for the Fuorisalone installation in the courtyard of the University of Milan. The project paves the way for a new approach to healthcare architecture.
“Breath” is based on the concept of “humanization”. It contributes to meeting healthcare’s functional and design requirements while creating environments that reduce staff stress and improve conditions for patients and their treatments. But how exactly is this achieved?
“Aiming to produce a concrete, uncomplicated project where we can bring the outdoors into the treatment areas and the natural environment and life inside ourselves, by reawakening our sensory memory.”
Filippo Taidelli, architect
The healthcare environment becomes a synthesis that combines technological innovation and nature. By merging outside and inside, reviving one’s inner self and the natural environment in the treatment rooms, dynamic, active and personal relationships are established with their users.
It is a mixture of reality and fiction that can take the patient by the hand and transport them to a “new dimension”, an abstract landscape. A plant-filled patio transforms the waiting room into an oasis; the corridor becomes a loggia with a view of the horizon. The connection to nature is essential in the diagnostic and radiology departments, where rooms have no natural light due to structural limitations. X-ray rooms are transformed into a lightbox where you look up at the sky through a large skylight. A suggestive combination which breaks down physical boundaries and encourages us to turn our gaze inwards.
Convince yourself of the comfortable atmosphere by comparing the conventional waiting area with the future one: