THEO SYDER 2019-20 YEAR 3

Reactive Rehab: A physiotherapy centre for animate rehabilitation

First Class Honours

Rehabilitation is seen as a concrete process within the American Healthcare system. Embedded in an urban landscape central Chicago, this Physiotherapy Centre challenges that status quo, deploying a dynamic and interactive architecture to offer a more holistic and accelerated recovery for the patients.

Rejecting the traditional placement of hospitals on the outskirts of American cities, the building brings together community and the city in the process of healing. Manifesting as a public landscape open to all, it offers an alternative to the transactional nature of the private healthcare system, where the role of environment in the process of healing is neglected. The Centre implements key principles of physiotherapy – flexibility, balance, strength, buoyancy – architecturally as well as programmatically.

A dynamic tensegrity structure reacts to and encourages mobility in the patients, whilst themes of force, anatomy, and movement drive the detailing at a more intimate scale.
Physiotherapy activities are veiled behind a series of privacy skins in an otherwise entirely public environment, both providing intrigue for the park-goers, and ensuring the rehabilitation is not a sterile or isolated experience for the patients. Choreographed relationships between landscape and building, public and private, patient and enclosure, play out in a structurally innovative and socially conscious new healthcare architecture.

Tutors: Greg Storrar, Farlie Reynolds