Reporting From the Front

Dated April 22, 2020, a letter written by Office of Metropolitan Architecture partner Reinier de Graaf takes the form of a message from the future to the present reflecting on the inadequacies of the healthcare system exposed by COVID-19. “The hospital director became manager. The doctors became staff. The patient became client,” de Graaf writes. He goes on: “Hotels became hospitals. Schools became hospitals. Sports stadia became hospitals. Exhibition and congress centres became hospitals.” In closing, he recounts the perceived failings of governments, entrepreneurs, and vaccine development, concluding that the only possible solution is to redesign the physical form of the hospital.

The future is here, and so is de Graaf’s answer to the failings of medical infrastructure. In April of this year, the firm released a video unveiling a client-commissioned project: the Al Dayaan Health District, a prototype for an autonomous hospital of the future developed for Qatar.

During the intro, a deep-voiced narrator worries that purpose-built hospitals are quickly becoming obsolete. He presents the problem as solvable only by design. The issue with hospitals is not austerity budgets, asymmetrical access to care, or healthcare labor issues: it’s that they’re vertical. The solution? A sprawling low-rise “system” consisting of “modules” that can be restructured based on shifting needs.

Their treatment of Qatar as an architectural playground gives OMA an out: they don’t have to address any of the issues with hospitals people watching from Europe and North America might be familiar with. Hospitals in the US are much more likely to close due to lack of public funding than obsolesce. It also sets up unlikely problems they heroically solve: food and energy supply, proposed to be self-generated in Al Dayaan, would only be an issue for a hospital in the desert or on another planet. This is architectural foresight: not of a possible contribution to social welfare, but of deep-pocketed clients who need stories to tell in times of crisis.