2023-09-25 08:59:06
At the psychiatric hospital, the architect must provide spatial solutions that de-dramatize the place and contribute to care. The premises must in particular avoid providing a feeling of confinement, while ensuring the greatest safety for caregivers and patients. For around thirty years, AA Group has been developing architectural thinking and projects in psychiatry. Co-president of the architecture and psychiatry commission within the Union of French-speaking architects in health (UAFS), Bruno Laudat presents its philosophy.
Psychic disorders are projected into the inhabited space. The architecture of this space therefore naturally influences its inhabitants, whether they are patients or caregivers. Steeped in good intentions, the architects who design them put themselves “at the service of”, which means that the issue is not the production of spaces but the nature of the relationships that users have with the place. The “resident” human being, the patient, is thus at the center of concerns. It is also about the relationships of caregivers, responsible for reestablishing contact with those who, isolated, seek to return to the world, or have lost all hope. And finally those of architects, who are asked to put into space the operating mode of institutional care organized between a place of care and a place of life.
If psychiatry has finally managed to exist on the same level as other medical disciplines, it must assume its architectural specificities, in particular freeing itself from Cartesian, rational and simplifying organizational principles to which somatic hospitals respond, for better efficiency , the aim of which is to produce a tool adapted to specific problems.
Unable to rely solely on chemical or technical processes, taking into account the human dimension of relationships between caregivers and patients goes beyond the simple framework of supporting the treatment that we have the right to expect during any hospital stay. Listening and empathy towards each other are an integral part of care and the environment must allow and encourage them.
Think roof rather than wall
The necessary consideration of the irrational dimension of psychological pathologies requires an architectural arsenal which can appear just as irrational:
- diversity as a therapeutic tool,
- the void as a space of freedom,
- the journey as a response to the state of crisis,
- contemporary aesthetics as a vector of integration
- urban settlement to fight against ostracization…
In a psychiatric hospital, the architect must provide spatial solutions that de-dramatize the place. The feeling of confinement must be banished while ensuring the greatest safety for caregivers and patients.
Within AA GROUP, we have been exploring avenues that serve this idea for around thirty years. One of them, undoubtedly the most effective and the most symbolic, is to approach the question by abandoning the idea of the wall in favor of that of the roof.
The wall is vertical: it separates, isolates, contains, prevents, orders, hierarchizes, excludes. He is a totalitarian tool.
Replacing walls with a roof means unifying, connecting, opening, allowing, mixing, equalizing, welcoming, protecting. It is a citizen tool.
It is a paradigm shift that caregivers must also take advantage of to imagine new care that we will be able to build with them.
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#Architects #service #psychiatric #care