'The real challenge of 21st-century healthcare design is how to ennoble the ordinary hospital to project the ethos of humane care'

摘要

The decade prior to the recession witnessed an increasing polarisation between extravagant iconic architecture laden with metaphor-ic references and commercialised generic buildings driven by naked market forces. These amounted, in effect, to two branding levels within architecture's competitive individualism - an architectural expression of the economic system that has now collapsed. In the UK, one of the most stereotypically downmarket of all building systems has been the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) of social building, in which the principle of cost-cutting competition has scattered shoddy, banal public buildings across the country.rnHitherto, attempts at reforming the deficiencies of PFI have perpetuated its competition-led system by adding design quality as a new factor within the competitive process - with predictable (dire) results. Reiach and Hall's newly completed Ambulatory Care and Diagnostic Centre (ACAD) at New Stobhill Hospital, Glasgow, suggests a radically different way out of this quandary: not by 'adding design', but by curbing competition. In this way, hopefully, many of the best features of the golden age of welfare state building, including its consistency and originality, couldrnbe revived without also reviving the organisational chaos of many projects of that period.