Get well soon: how new designs aid patient recovery.

Robin Guenther, principal of Guenther 5 architects, recently completed a $10 million dollar renovation of a cancer treatment center for Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, incorporating environmentally sensitive materials into her design that she hopes contributes to patient's recovery.

Green techniques Guenther incorporates into her work gives her an edge over green designers of other types of projects who hedge bets that users will feel long-term effects of their work--as patients report changes faster. This change could be partially attributed to incorporated materials into the design of the center including materials such as healthy cleaning products, VOC free paint, and formaldehyde free insulation, that may help improve patients breathing.

Yet Guenther's 25-year career in architecture has been largely devoted to health care design projects through which she has sought to "combine the sacred and the technical." As with all good architecture, the more intangible aspects of the building's design bears the brunt of the burden for inspiring the user.

"One of the most disturbing aspects of health care treatment for most people is their loss of control. Sometimes they feel like they check their ability to think for themselves at the door when they check in," Guenther said. "We try and make designs that reestablish people's connection with nature and with their physical environment. At the same time we try to make them feel that even though they are in a hospital they still maintain some semblance of control, they can still make choices."

To help reestablish patient's control, Gunether enlisted the help of community members who visit the facility, including a local Feng Shui expert to help her align with the cultural context of the community--which includes a large Asian population. Feng Shui is a Chinese practice which seeks to arrange space in a way that will contribute to harmony with the environment. Guenther amended her plans in accordance with the experts recommendations which included the relocation of the entrance to the building and the parking garage.

"Asians put a lot of value in the building, and believe that the success of a place is largely determined by the building itself. You wouldn't want to put a cancer center in a space that wasn't seen to be successful," Guenther said.

She further rearranged the space by opening it up.

Once a dark, cave-like building originally used as a check processing center, Maimonides' new cancer center is an airy room flooded with light. In the waiting room 120 square feet of recycled glass windows jut out of warm bamboo floors. Outside a terraced garden blooms. The floors are made of lightweight bamboo. Nurses' stations' and doors are built out of agriboards made from wheat. Skylights and low level lighting soften the mood.

"When you enter the building it doesn't even look like a hospital," said Derek Goins, Senior Vice President of Maimonides Medical Center. "We have had nothing but positive feedback on the renovated facility. It really helps improve the patient's mood to be in a beautiful facility like this, and when they feel better they heal better,"

In order to help families and patients further adjust to the hospitals, Guenther created an octagonal shaped mediation room where patients and families can go to think, that is made out of thick translucent plastic with low level lighting and is carpeted to absorb sound.

Family consultation rooms designed in "living room style," with video-conferencing equipment that can be used to call in expert doctors from other areas, were also created.

"We wanted to break down what is sometimes a pretty large and inhuman scale of these models, and create a more comfortable, more natural kind of subspace," Gunether said.

The heart of the change in the facility took place the infusion room where patients go to receive chemotherapy treatments.

The room which is located in the basement due to the radiation machines which must be vaulted, was separated to include both private cubicles and open space.

Lounge chairs and lighting that can be dimmed by patients, are also included in the project. The infusion facility has a natural stone floor. Patients can look out the doors to a garden that has been dug below ground.

Although that change may not cure patients of their cancers, Guenther hopes it will go a long way towards improving their moods.

"We wanted to create a kind of an oasis in the middle of the city that just feels a little calmer and quieter and more natural," Guenther said.