La dimensione terapeutica urbana e le architetture per la cura. Uno sguardo sulla evoluzione del concetto di cura e sugli spazi che la supportano

In contemporary society, the hospital loses its hegemony as architecture intended for the care of the sick to make room for an articulated series of decentralized healthcare facilities, often smaller in size and integrated by a series of other services. Some of these simple concepts, often pursued throughout history, have been lost with the emergence of rationalism and modernist efficiency. Contemporary medical concepts have therefore again expanded the concept of health to a more general condition of well-being, introducing the importance of prevention to avoid incurring pathologies. The evolutionary nature of the approach to care, which has been increasingly faster in recent years, makes the rigid classifications and typological prescriptions of the past inadequate, as well as the exclusively efficient attitude of modernity, favoring a more flexible, adaptive and available approach to accommodate further transformations. New healthcare architectures have completely lost the need to be places separate from the city. Therefore, it is no longer a matter of imagining autonomous fragments of city-gardens or hermitages isolated on the heights; a demand for diversified structures capable of accommodating the needs of the emerging sector dedicated to “taking care” of the patient is growing, a demedicalized area, a type of “hybrid building” where traditional clinical institutions merge with a set of other functions.