Winner of the 2006
National EDRA Places Award!

The element of passion in a work of architecture, usually centered on formal composition, materials, and siting, tends to obscure serious critical attention accorded to a building’s lived qualities and too often ignores a building’s social meaning or compassionate intent. Compassion in Architecture: Evidence-based Design for Health in Louisiana represents an approach that reconciles such contradictory concerns in architecture. It is a call for a new era of social advocacy in architectural design, one that truly incorporates the formal, experiential, and human aspects of architecture.

The discussion centers on a method for improving treatment settings for underrepresented minority populations and medically underserved patients throughout Louisiana. The evidence-based research and design (EBR&D) process is applied to the reinvention of Louisiana’s network of community care clinics and public health support facilities.

Author Stephen Verderber spent over a decade compiling information for this book, which contains several first person narratives and eight case studies. Combined with his architect’s eye for a successful physical structure, the personal stories and examples reveal underlying broader social, political, and cultural dimensions and reinforce the presentation of a lexicon of generative planning and design principles and guidelines.

The research and design work is centered on the importance of compassionate architecture for community health in the civic realm, and the enduring significance of places for health care in a community. The reader is carefully taken through each step in the process, from project inception to completion and post-occupancy assessment, in what is likely the longest continuously running evidence-based research and design initiative to date.

More than just a call to architectural arms, Compassion in Architecture is a detailed analysis of what components are necessary and vital to a community’s public health facility. Verderber utilizes numerous illustrations, diagrams, and charts to support his text, making this study all the more informative. Compassion in Architecture is a must have work for any one interested in architecture or public health.

Compassion in Architecture: Evidence-Based Design for Health in Louisiana. ix, 338 pp. Appendices, Notes, Index. Hardback, ISBN 1-887366-63-6, $45.00.

EDRA (Environmental Design Research Association) is an international, interdisciplinary organization founded in 1968 by design professionals, social scientists, students, educators, and facility managers. Its goal is to advance and disseminate environmental design research, thereby improving understanding of the interrelationships between people, their built and natural surroundings, and help to create environments responsive to human needs.