A New Approach to the Flows System Analysis in the Teaching Hospitals

The actual picture of health care building is a continuous transformation across time and space. Particularly in Italy many hospitals built in the past century are changing their image and organization. Moreover we assist to the raise of a consistent public movement inside the hospital due to a reduction of hospitalization time, an increase of the activities for outpatients and a hospital opening process to urban context. For these reasons one of the main factors that concern a hospital good design is the connection system among the different areas and spaces with specific regard to public flows. This paper contributes to the analysis about the connection spaces identifying the relevance and the critical factors of flows and paths system from a different point of view introduced by Space Syntax methodology. The study shows the potentiality of an evidence-based approach combining both the social and spatial aspect concerning the people movement compared to the traditional functional approach. Space Syntax was chose as a possible tool to respond to the lack of means to verify the efficiency of paths in Teaching Hospital typology by blocks and under transformation. In fact the case study selected for the analysis is the Careggi University Hospital in Florence where the redevelopment works are still in progress. In this paper I describe two research phases both tested on the case-study. The first concerns the system corresponding to the whole areas of hospital and aims to show how the flows could be analyzed in according to the main principles proposed in literature through an existing analysis by people categories. The second concerns the building scale in order to analyse more deeply the effects of spatial layout on the Emergency Patient Path design and to support the design process in the choice of the spatial proximity relationships. General aims of this study are also: contribute to the discussion about contemporary hospital typology and promotes considerations about the use of type layout in health care architecture; deliver knowledge about design and management systems of hospital complex under a flows study profile that introduces more attention to the social aspect; supply designers, planners and health trusts with tools to be used in the design and monitoring phases to compare different project proposals with regard to impact quality for hospital users.