? ? This grant proposal seeks funding to complete a book manuscript titled """"""""Pavilions to Skyscrapers: A History of Healthy Hospital Design."""""""" This book will be the first to integrate the architectural and medical history of American hospitals and will reveal a fundamental shift in how the design of hospitals was understood to affect the healthiness of its patients. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in New York City, 'ideal' hospital architecture shifted from a self-purifying environment intended to minimize the internal spread of specific diseases to a functional spatial layout that promoted efficient, collaborative, and increasingly 'scientific' medical treatment. The visible signal of this shift was the switch from pavilion-ward (low-rise, decentralized, suburban) to skyscraper (high-rise, centralized, urban) hospital construction; the invisible signal of this shift was the switch from an architecture designed around the miasmatic fixation on the movement and 'purity' of light and air to one designed around the mature germ-theory driven focus on the movement and 'purity' of people and goods. This shift is ongoing and of relevance to modern hospital design and practice, and consequently to public health which is integrally linked to hospital care. T his book will provide historical perspective to persistent issues of hospital design. The book will consist of 9 chapters. Each chapter will examine hospital development across the city, but will also focus on one or two 'model' hospitals for a given time period. Each chapter will discuss three scales of hospital architecture decisions: site choice, building layout, and ward design. The book will also assess the extent to which New York City's experiences matched experiences in other American cities and discuss the changing nature of expertise (architectural and medical) thought necessary to design a healthy hospital. The research for this book is largely in primary sources, including hospital annual reports, professional periodicals, newspapers, treatises on hospital design, and archival records of individual hospitals which include meeting minutes, committee reports, photos, drawings, and internal correspondence. The research is substantially complete, but still requires brief visits to several New York City libraries, historical collections, and hospital archives. The P. I. is asking for 18 months of funding, from July 1, 2008 to December 31, 2009, including two weeks of travel expenses to New York City to complete the archival research and salary compensation to allow the researcher the time necessary to complete the manuscript. ? ? ? ?
