Rachel Pump

This thesis is a critique of the modern hospital, which has lost touch with the needs of the world outside its envelope. Looking to the impending climate emergency, the continued miniaturization of technology, and evolving understandings about spaces of wellness, the requirements of the hospital are shifting. Yet, the modern hospital typology is not prepared for the uncertainty ahead. This project asserts that wellness is an ecological condition and proposes a loosening of fixed ratios within the hospital to create new relationships between different spaces, practices, materials, and needs.

Within the Emergency Care Center in Montenegro, the typical hospital visit is unpacked from its rigid bounds, unrolled, and laid down as a ribbon-like journey from arrival to recovery. The project is a lamination of building and site, hospital and garden, circulation and program–the layering of which creates a unique strength and flexibility in the face of uncertainty. This vision of Emergency Care at the Clinical Centre of Montenegro challenges the hospital to make room for negotiating an architecture of care in a transitioning future.