Annmarie Adams

Kids in the atrium: comparing architectural intentions and children's experiences in a pediatric hospital lobby.

The study reported here adopts an interdisciplinary focus to elicit childrens views about hospital environments. Based at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), Toronto, the research explores the ways in which designers and patients understand and use the eight-storey lobby, The Atrium, a monumental addition constructed in 1993. It is a public place that never closes; hundreds of children pass through the namesake atrium every day. Combining methodological approaches from architectural history and health sociology, the intentions and uses of central features of the hospital atrium are examined. Data were collected from observations, focused interviews, and textual and visual documents. We locate the contemporary atrium in a historical context of building typologies rarely connected to hospital design, such as shopping malls, hotels and airports. We link the design of these multi-storey, glass-roofed spaces to other urban experiences especially consumption as normalizing forces in the everyday lives of Canadian children. Seeking to uncover childrens self-identified, self-articulated place within contemporary pediatric hospitals, we assess how the atrium--by providing important, but difficult-to-measure functions such as comfort, socialization, interface, wayfinding, contact with nature and diurnal rhythms, and respite from adjacent medicalized spaces--contributes to the well-being of young patients. We used theoretical underpinnings from architecture and humanistic geography, and participatory methods advocated by child researchers and theorists. Our findings begin to address the significant gap in understanding about the relationship between the perceptions of children and the settings where their healthcare occurs. The study also underlines childrens potential to serve as agents of architectural knowledge, reporting on and recording their observations of hospital architecture with remarkable sophistication.

Modernism and Medicine: The Hospitals of Stevens and Lee, 1916-1932

This paper considers the work of Bostonand Toronto-based architects Edward Stevens and Frederick Lee during a critical period in North American hospital expansion. Without exception, their hospitals represented state-of-the-art planning wrapped in conservative exteriors. The firm9s work thus offers a rich case study from which to consider the notion of historicist design as a mechanism for coping with change. This paper focuses on five Stevens-and-Lee projects: Notre Dame Hospital and two additions to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, the Kingston General Hospital, and the Ottawa Civic Hospital. Their buildings can be considered typical of the period, since Stevens and Lee designed prominent hospitals across North America. An interpretation of the hospitals is further enriched by the prospect of comparing what was built to the architects9 own words. Edward Stevens9s The American Hospital of the Twentieth Century (1918) is a classic in the field of hospital architecture, and he published extensively in the architectural and medical professional presses. The study of Steven9s words and his hospitals illuminates the inherent danger of regarding historicist building types as antimodern or necessarily conventional. It also reveals the paucity of stylistic interpretations of all architecture. This approach has resulted in the widespread misinterpretation of interwar hospitals as reactionary, or at best antimodern. For this reason, hospitals of the 1920s are generally omitted from studies of the building type and are seen, mistakenly, as simple reverberations of the nineteenth-century model. Generic hospital architecture of the interwar years was modern in its spatial attitudes-not necessarily its look, but rather in its structure, its endorsement of aseptic medical practice, its sanctioning of expert knowledge, its appeal to new patrons, its encouragement of new ways of working, its response to urbanization, its use of zoning, its acceptance of modern social structures, its resemblance to other modern building types, its embrace of internationalism, and its endorsement of standardization.

Collapse and Expand: Architecture and Tuberculosis Therapy in Montreal, 1909, 1933, 1954

This paper explores the complex reflexive relationships among technologies associated with tuberculosis care and treatment: the fresh air cure, surgical collapse therapy, architecture, and chemotherapy. We review the architectural histories of the Royal Edward Laurentian Hospital (now the Montreal Chest Institute) to track important transformations of treatment environments. We recount how the rest-cure prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century started a tradition, lasting until the age of antibiotics, in which architectural settings were deployed as physical agents of treatment. A technology in this sense, then, is a set of resource-using practices marshaled to eradicate the disease. We argue that the endurance of specialized tuberculosis architecture, with its porches, balconies, and sunning galleries, provided crucial material and spatial continuity for therapy, even after chemotherapy’s successes augured the end of dedicated tuberculosis hospitals and sanatoria.

Portraying Maude Abbott

A portrait of eminent Canadian physician Maude Abbott (1869–1940) has been identified at least 66 years after it was painted by Canadian artist Mary Eastlake. This article recounts its discovery, identifies the sitter as Abbott, and compares this painting to the iconic Eastlake painting of Abbott

Pneumothorax Then and Now

This article begins with a photograph of the Children’s Memorial Hospital in Montreal depicting the induction of a pneumothorax, a treatment for tuberculosis (TB) used from the 1920s to the 1940s. The authors place the photograph in historical context and review the contents of the room it shows, including a patient’s chest X ray. Building on Martha Langford’s Suspended Conversations, the authors examine the use of such photographic and X ray images in depictions of TB care in the mid-20th century. The authors parallel the spaces shown explicitly (the treatment facility) with those shown implicitly (the chest cavity) and then juxtapose these historical images with those of medical thoracoscopy, a current technique for visualizing chest disease that likewise begins with pneumothorax. Finally, the authors consider the changing audience for these images by highlighting the evolving role of the patient as actor and consumer rather than as passive recipient of health care expertise.

The Spaces of the Hospital: Spatiality and Urban Change in London 1680–1820.

1975, providing a direct if retrospective perspective on both Modernism and practice. That objective story of subjective recall rightly follows a series of critically framed essays by the trio of authors. Herrington preferred to run more anecdotal and dialogical content through her chrono-thematic chapters—corresponding to the water coursing through several of Oberlander’s landscapes. If the temporal sequence is thus partially interrupted, Herrington enables the reader to gain a better understanding of the theoretical and material contexts for Oberlander’s equally distinguished career from single-family house gardens to her recent landscaping of the Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly in Yellowknife. Stouck reverted to the older paradigm of intensive inquiry into personal documentation. By concentrating on Erickson’s private life, he nonetheless discloses a great deal about Erickson’s design heritage and objectives, building on the extant literature.3 As a group, these books will enhance scholarly and wider public appreciation of both Modernism and its impact upon Canadian architecture and landscape architecture.4 In examining single careers, these also reiterate how design production is mediated by matters of individual ability, experience, network of association, and response to conditions of practice.

A Doctor in the House: The Architecture of Home-offices for Physicians in Toronto, 1885–1930

Dr William Dumble’s house in Toronto (Figure 1) looked like many other middle-class homes constructed in North American urban centres in the early twentieth century. The twostorey, brick house with a hipped roof and dormer window was typical in its blocky massing, pronounced chimney, generous setback from the street, contrasting materials, and careful detailing. Such houses were intended to house a typical family: two parents, perhaps a few children, and maybe a servant or lodger. Even the way the architects Burke, Horwood andWhite drew the building’s facade—in soft pencil and red ink on tracing paper, showing the warm tone of the red brick and the rough texture of the stucco trim and manicured lawn—signalled domesticity. Both the house design and the architects drawing, that is, were styled to appear friendly, inviting, and traditional. The house corresponds to the general type of domestic architecture built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a picturesque, non-classical, asymmetrical cottage ‘‘with diverse visual and tactile effects on the exterior and an integration between exterior form and inside spaces’’. Burke, Horwood and White’s floor plan of the house, however, reveals little integration between the front elevation and the spaces inside, which were much more commercial and scientific than the homey exterior suggested. Behind the bay window, to the right of the front door, was the physician’s office; across the hall, boasting white pine trim, oak borders, and a gas fireplace, was a waiting-room for patients. Indeed, nearly half of the ground floor area of the Dumble house was given over to his medical practice, with a close and direct connection to rooms presumably used by his family and live-in

Surgery and Architecture: Spaces for Operating

This contribution surveys key places in the history of architecture for surgery, focusing on Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It locates the changing sites of surgery within general hospitals, noting the evolution from the surgical amphitheater, open to viewers and often at the edges of hospitals, to today’s highly exclusive surgical spaces embedded in the centre of healthcare complexes. The Victorian amphitheater, interwar surgical suite, and postwar OR are called out as particularly important. Surgical architecture has illustrated rather than shaping the history of surgery and proposes engaging architecture as evidence, rather than illustration, and as an alternative approach to the history of surgery, illuminating the importance of space and place.

Making Himself at Home: Cormier, Trudeau, and the Architecture of Domestic Masculinity

Montreal architect Ernest Cormier designed and occupied the art deco house at 1418 Pine Avenue starting in 1930–31 to accommodate his unusual living arrangement with Clorinthe Perron. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, fifteenth prime minister of Canada, purchased the house in 1979 to suit his different and yet equally atypical masculinity as retired head of state and single father. The house’s unique spatial program and its artifacts comprise an architecture of domestic masculinity reflecting Cormier’s autobiographical narrative as well as Trudeau’s reanimation of that narrative by restoring, maintaining, supplementing, showing, and/or rearranging those spaces and signifiers to accommodate his self-image.

Peter Collins: A Study in Parallax

Abstract This article illustrates how architectural educator and historian Peter Collinss collection of 35-mm slides and his personal papers are useful windows on his work, life, and even his death. Parallax allowed Collins to constantly reinvent himself and his work, just as his books suggested that it had provided twentieth-century architects with a revolutionary way of making space.