Order your copy of Architecture of Health

While combating the COVID-19 pandemic, the public has asked architects why our buildings make us sicker. A new book authored by Founding Principal and Executive Director Michael P. Murphy, Jr. with Design Director Jeffrey Mansfield and MASS Design Group explores this question and unearths how the architecture around us has been influenced by developments in healthcare. The Architecture of Health examines how our built world was shaped by disease and reveals how historical examples can offer us caution and inspiration.

The Architecture of Health posits that a historical analysis of hospitals is essential to understanding their architectural function in the present. Murphy, Mansfield, and MASS, gathered research from over a decade of work in global healthcare design. This book intends to show, through hospital design, that architecture’s larger impact on society is clear and inseparable. While the historical and contemporary debate continues as to whether architecture can influence social or physiological change, hospitals provide a definitive counterpoint to demonstrate that the behavior and health of individuals are shaped by the design of spaces around them.

In 2020 it became apparent that design can have a negative impact on healing if it cannot adapt to public needs, especially in a time of crisis. A pattern is laid bare: that buildings rigidly designed to solve one function may not be able to adapt when there is a tidal shift in healthcare needs. The book urges us to ask: Why have the designs in our healthcare facilities failed us so frequently? How can the spaces around us be designed to improve and better serve our health and society? And finally, when our collective health has been compromised, can the lesson in solving for our right to breathe offer a vision forward?

MASS Design Group was founded to build a movement where architecture creates a better, more beautiful, more just world. The funds raised by MASS Design Group are devoted to furthering this goal.

Order your Copy of Architecture of Health:

Retail value starts at $45.