Harvard Graduate School of Design

MASS was invited to present a seminar at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design entitled, The Architecture of Health: Power, Technocracy, and the Hospital. The seminar traces the form of the hospital from the 1400s to the present, across Europe, the United States, and Africa. The seminar draws on a complex historical context that includes medical science, architectural thought, and political and social systems that surround and influence the hospital. Through case studies and historical analysis of an oft-overlooked architectural typology, the seminar reveals the hospital as a receptor and generator of new politics, social orders, and architectural paradigms and describe the design tensions that have defined the typology across several eras. A publication of the same title is forthcoming.