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BUILDING AND HEALING THE ARCHITECTURE OF HOSPITALS Edited by Cor Wagenaar. Rotterdam: NAi. 2006. euro59.50
The new University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG) opened in 1997 after ten years of construction and reconstruction. It was soon recognised internationally as an exemplar: in its contribution to the city's public realm, in its internal environment, in its functionality; the kind of hospital that from a UK perspective you only find abroad and can only envy. What is it that enables the Scandinavians, the Dutch and a few other more southerly Europeans to get things right in hospitals? One clue lies in the very existence of this book, the result of an eight-year continuation of the project of study and research that led to...