Health care architecture in the Netherlands describes the evolution of buildings for health care: hospitals and psychiatric institutions as well as housing and care facilities for the elderly. Architecture is particularly significant in health care it reflects developments in care, medical innovations, changing insights in psychiatry, and socio-cultural opinions on the position of old people. There is no type of building in which the relation between function, structure and design is revealed so clearly as in health care architecture, and nowhere is the relation between buildings and the physical and mental wellbeing of the people for whom they are designed so intense. This book is a plea for the (re)discovery of this quality of architecture.

Eight chapters provide a chronological overview of the architecture of buildings for health care, from its emergence as a specific typology in the late eighteenth century to the most recent care complexes. In addition, some fifty buildings from the last century and a half are described and illustrated in detail. A series of thematic texts addresses specific aspects of national and international architecture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in relation to buildings for the health care sector. Their topics range from issues of utility versus architecture to the concept of healing environments.