The overall spatial design of the Shenzhen Qianhai Taikang Hospital International Medical Department represents an active exploration of healing spaces within an art hospital, conducted in collaboration with Taikang's design management and medical teams.
Nurse Station
In early 2023, Luo Zhenhua and his team presented the concept of artistic healing to Taikang's senior management and medical team. Fortunately, the Shenzhen Qianhai Taikang Hospital International Medical Department successfully brought this vision to life a year and a half later.
The design of the Shenzhen Qianhai Taikang Hospital International Medical Department is based on the concept of an "art hospital," exploring a contemporary approach to medical environments. For a long time, art has been a means of communication, self-expression, and healing. Since the 1940s, art therapy has even become a formal program.
This design attempts to integrate easel painting, photography, ceramics, floral art, sculpture, and even 3D-printed crafts and music with spatial design, creating a perse artistic combination that resonates with the theme and function of an "art hospital." In the technological age, people are accustomed to direct, immediate, and simple ways of viewing, but medical spaces encourage a different type of interaction: close, guided, and accompanied.
Art therapy can be used to treat various diseases and psychological issues: age-related illnesses, cancer, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc. The extension of interacting with art is interacting with emotions, the body, and the world. Healing often occurs naturally in this process.
Providing better comfort and a rich living and treatment space for different patients creates a more positive hospitalization experience: for example, receiving visitors or resting and healing in various scenarios during hospitalization, focusing more on family-unit health check-ups, efficient flow lines between the international medical department and hospital resources, and advanced remote diagnosis and treatment.
For medical spaces, perhaps spatial strategies such as "sharing, flexibility, transparency" do not work. Instead, "pision, isolation, protection, sealing" have become indisputable keywords. However, the Shenzhen Qianhai Taikang Hospital International Medical Department's soft public space design finds a compromise.
Unlike pure isolation, focusing on privacy is an important task to meet patient comfort and satisfaction. Creating private and comfortable medical spaces can significantly enhance the overall patient experience and improve clinical outcomes, while ensuring that patients do not feel isolated or even abandoned.
At the independent main entrance of the international medical department, the spatial organization from outside to inside includes a screen wall and a series of spatial hints, allowing patients and guests to feel privacy and prestige; within the floors, diagnosis, communication, dining, and rest spaces are softly separated by bookshelves, screens, and floral art, combined with flow line processing, ensuring spatial connectivity, efficient use, and appropriate privacy.
In a full life cycle, old age is an inevitable process, and the era of longevity means the extension of this process—the lengthening of the process from robustness to weakness, disability, and ultimately death. In this process full of loss and decline, how to maximize happiness and dignity is an issue that medical spaces increasingly need to pay attention to.
In addition to the use of advanced medical equipment and technology, multidisciplinary coordination, maximizing personalized services for the elderly, and targeted comfortable medical environments: meeting the needs of this group for comprehensive health management and disease prevention and treatment.
At the same time, combining art can also improve the self-esteem of the elderly and actively cope with chronic diseases.
For modern medical space design, the so-called "increasing professionalism" immediately brings about stylized work, and the repetition of so-called "experience" can easily lead to rigid design. Fangxia Design hopes to use years of accumulated in-depth research and practice on "clothing, food, housing, transportation, medical care, education, art..." to design spaces that are both "professional" and "deep and warm," ultimately increasing the happiness index.