Creating Healing Space
illustrated by the new
Glasgow Homoeopathic Hospital
and Gardens
“We wish to create a place of beauty
and healing”
Design Brief 1995
Macmon Architects
Jane Kelly - Lead Artist
David Reilly - Project Director
“I can feel the healing environment the moment I walk in the
door. I love the curves the colours the windows and the
garden especially”.
Lizzie Farey, Artist
..the
consultation
begins
before the
consultation..
you bring your
hopes and
fears as you
walk towards
the meeting…
..how that
place is,
..and how
that person
who meets
you is…
all of it will
make an
impact…
See I am a magician. I
take ordinary objects and
by combining them I
create mystery. If you
enter my colours you
enter dream then return
to the world refreshed.
Derek Hyatt
So what are we to do about our
hospitals?
Scientific evidence has now
established that the physical
environment directly affects the
healing responses of human beings
“I love this building to bits.
The first time I came here I cried.”
Sandra Smith, Ward Sister
Psychoneuroimmunolgy
It used to be easy.
The mind and body were seen as separate.
We had head doctors and body doctors.
Then the flat earth became round.
Immune cells were found to have receptors for
neurotransmitters from our brain.
Our feelings and hopes affect our illness and
recovery.
“You get encouragement to be
yourself here. I can’t think of
the words, it’s not like being
out of your body but there is
a sensation of looking down
on yourself and beginning to
see what others are seeing.”
Patient
“Patients find the atmosphere soothing and relaxing - an
ideal setting for people who have suffered physical and
emotional stress and pain...”
Stephanie, Physiotherapy Dept
”The quality of light in the gym, and the fact that there is
an entire wall of glass looking out into the garden means
that the view is seasonal, and, dispels the prospective
gloom of a working day ahead!”
“The department is a pleasant place to be. Working
here reduces my old feelings of my work being
entirely separated from the rest of my life.”
Stephanie Wilson, Physiotherapy Dept
We were determined from the very beginning that the
hospital would more be art, than have art
I mention from
experience, as quite
perceptible in
promoting recovery,
the being able to see
out of a window… the
bright colours of
flowers..being able to
read in bed by the light
of a window… the
effects are on the mind
and no less so on the
body.
Florence Nightingale
Views through a window may influence recovery from surgery
Comparing the impact of the view from the hospital
window on recovery of two matched groups of post op
surgical patients. Indicators included reduction in
analgesics, fewer complaints, lower blood pressure,
fewer adverse observations by staff and earlier discharge
in those in the room with a view of the landscaped
grounds compared to those with only a brick wall in view.
Ulrich R.Science 1984;224:420-421.
We will still need to see, hear, smell,
taste and touch real things in order to
confirm their presence and make
sense of our own existence…. within
the direct physical, humane
experience of material reality.
Jane Hamlyn 1995
“The garden gives you the
chance to relax. I get lost in
that garden, sucked into the
trees and the birds in the sky.
Before I would see these
things but I didn’t connect to
them – it is another world – I
have learned to appreciate it,
and it does something to you,
it’s amazing.”
Patient
Sometimes patients even sit in the garden in the
Scottish rain
From a patient’s letter
Thank you so much for everything
you have created at the hospital. I
wonder if you realise how important it
is to those of us who depend upon its
environment to calm us, strengthen
us, and then send us out into the
world to cope for another while.
An in-patient’s experience…
One evening,
when I couldn’t
sleep I stepped
out into the
garden and into
another world.
The paths, were
ribbons of earth
captured
moonlight.
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