Nature Nurtures: Architectural Greenery Systems to Support Healing in Canadian Hospitals

Abstract

How can living plant systems be combined with healthcare facility architecture to increase beneficial interactions with nature, while still maintaining healthcare standards of safety, efficiency, and control? Nature can provide healing benefits to hospital occupants by lifting their spirits and by counteracting the difficulties of fighting illness. Architectural designers can help to create more positive hospital environments by utilizing vegetation as a building material and in building systems. Vertical and raised greenery systems such as living walls, green façades, and green roofs can deliver more accessible green spaces in dense, urban hospital sites. Greenery systems can also create synergistic relationships between plant life and functional healthcare programs. This thesis analyzes the benefits, costs, and challenges of greenery system typologies and their various construction types. Demonstrated are architectural designs for key patient and visitor spaces in a hypothetical patient tower on an existing Canadian hospital redevelopment site. Within this design, greenery systems support long-term care patients of specialty units like rehabilitation, palliative care, acute elderly care, and mental health. By providing knowledge about the application of architectural greenery systems, this thesis promotes a sustainable design of greenery systems and a plant-based philosophy to the way hospitals are envisioned, and health care is achieved.