Conversation: buildings: cross-cultural perspectives on architectural history, healthcare architecture, and environmental humanities

Abstract

This conversation piece focuses on several issues related to health and environmental humanities and the intersections of these fields with architectural history and critical heritage studies. The conversation is centred around three themes: sustainability and the adaptive reuse of healthcare architecture, the persistence of a nature-culture divide in the theory and practice of heritage studies and architectural history, and the re-emergence of concepts, such as biophilic design, for healthcare architecture that have gained popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic. Within the context of these three themes, architectural historians Uğurgül Tunç, Lucienne Thys-Şenocak, and Joana Balsa de Pinho discuss case studies from various geographies and time periods: the European Renaissance, the Early Modern Ottoman era, the first decades of twentieth-century Türkiye, contemporary Portugal, Canada, and the US. Most of the case studies discussed here are examples of architectural typologies related to healthcare, such as hospitals and medical research centres, and reflect the research interests of the conversation participants. This conversation, while addressing methodological concerns about health and environmental humanities, explores how these fields are related to architectural history. The participants highlight how architectural historians can play an important role in guiding and inspiring design decisions for healthcare architecture by looking more critically and creatively at this building typology, and building practices of the past. The participants conclude that there are many benefits to stepping outside the narrower methodological boundaries of architectural history to entangle their research in health and environmental humanities.