The custom of bringing flowers to the sick is part of a centuries-old belief that it is possible to create a healing environment. But what if instead of bringing blooms to the patient, you brought the patient to the blooms?
With recent major building projects at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, designers have incorporated a variety of gardens and landscaped spaces that seek to connect people who are seriously ill to the soothing qualities of the green world.
In recent decades, scientific research has begun to demonstrate the therapeutic importance of incorporating the natural world into the healing process, said John Gallin, director of the Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Center at the 310-acre campus.
Gallin asked Robert Frasca of architects Zimmer, Gunsul, Frasca to consider this newest research and integrate therapeutic open areas into the overall design of the new center. "The whole idea was to make it a healing place. While the NIH has a large campus setting, there were few patient-accessible, user-friendly outdoor spaces," Frasca said.
As a result, the 242 beds in the Hatfield Center, which opened to patients in April, are placed in front of oversize picture windows positioned low enough to allow even bedridden patients to look down on the building's twin open-air courtyard gardens.
On the ground level, undulating paths curve around beds planted with a rich mix of ground covers, ferns, shrubs and specimen trees. Interspersed are benches for patients, medical staff and family members to revive themselves with a breath of fresh air and soothing greenery of year-round interest. The courtyard gardens were designed by landscape architect Roger Courtenay of EDAW, Inc. in Alexandria.
The two rectangular gardens -- each approximately 16,000 square feet -- extend from either side of a central, seven-story atrium. Known as the Science Court, it is a light-filled cavern of glass meant to boost the spirits of both the patients and staff who gather here. They are drawn to the calming murmur of flowing water, a waterfall that empties into a stream-like channel of bronze that meanders under a low bridge. This sculpture, called "The Oasis," was created by husband and wife artists Susan and Gene Flores of Plainfield, Mass., who are both cancer survivors.
In keeping with the oasis concept, dozens of 20-foot-tall potted palms are arrayed around groupings of tables and chairs. Even the Clinical Center's windowless basement, which houses the radiation oncology unit, offers an expansive stone-and-blue-tile waterfall structure to provide the needed natural element.
"A real effort was made to bring the outside indoors," Gallin said.
Just a short distance from the Clinical Center is the new Claudio and Evelyne Cohen Garden, designed as an extension of the 34-room Edmond J. Safra Family Lodge, which opened in June. The Safra Lodge is designed to look like an English manor house, while the layout of the adjoining 6,500-square-foot garden "recalls mid-19th-century parklike settings," said Madison Cox, its New York-based designer.
Sinuous paths wind around a large rolling lawn in the center, with half-hidden areas. The idea, Cox said, was to offer a "great number of little areas, which afford privacy not available in a hospital setting and gives people breathing space."
Just off the path is a curved patio arrayed with wrought-iron cafe tables and chairs and surrounded by hydrangeas and tall, graceful river birches. Another patio and seating area adjoins a rose garden, which can be seen from the lodge's dining room. On one side of the garden is a charming rough-hewn square gazebo, the benches still showing their original bark. On the other side is a second, larger rustic gazebo, screened by rhododendrons, adorned with climbing roses and housing more benches.
