Issue 7 of Fourth Door Review appears in june 2005. Building on the success of FDR6, issue 7 heads into new terrain. The review offers the some of the most in-depth coverage of the emerging transformation coalescing around healthcare design, architecture and sustainability, led from the fast moving Scottish based Maggie Centres cancer care movement, and featuring the significant changes in the NHS. This major Scenario themed section slides into place within a hefty content full issue, drawing together some of the most exciting ecologically related creative work being carried out in the early twenty first century. In turn Fourth Door Review makes singular and inspiring connections between ecology and technology, arts and architecture, design, craft and new media and new music; connections elsewhere neither made nor highlighted.
This issue’s Fourth Door Review centrepiece is the Architexts Scenario themed section, sub-titled Design with Care. The section explores the new and recent buildings of the Maggie Centres movement, featuring a Frank Gehry interview, Charles Jencks writing on the whole Maggies story, plus an overview of the related wider field of ongoing research being carried out in the healthcare design field, and a call for architects to take on the sustainable argument for improvements in health to be met with healthy buildings. Alongside the Design with Care section, building on its focus on contemporary Timberbuild in previous issues Architexts features an in-depth interview with Europe’s leading timber engineer, Julius Natterer.
Design with Care section in detail
The specially themed section 'Design with Care' focuses on the interconnected relationships between healthcare design, both within the NHS context and without, using the Maggie Centre movement as a means to broadening the terms of the debate. This includes pieces:
· on the general situation in healthcare architecture, relating
the Maggie movement to research and newbuild in the NHS.
· by Charles Jencks on the Maggie movement 'so far'.
· a Frank Gehry interview discussing his use of timber, materials
absolutists, of Gehry taking on a hospital project and 'landscape'.
· by Fionn Stevenson on architectural healthcare and the senses, and
the tactile.
· on the prospects of sustainability gaining a firmer hand in the
NHS by Susan Francis.
· linking both the Gehry and new Maggie Highland buildings to complexity
theory through the lower tech aesthetic of timberbuild and craft practice,
the psychological benefits of wood in healthcare, as well as, arguably, these
buildings being 'outsider' markers for sustainable architects to consider
when thinking of buildings in relationship to 'complexity-informed' nature.
There is also a linked piece in the new media section, Digitalis, by Mark
O' Connor on the relationship between the high technology CATIER computer
system and craft practice used for Maggies Dundee.
