Abstract

Mental healthcare facilities are only as successful as their ability to interact with their communities. Many current schemes echo a village concept and/or normalised living regime, yet do so within an insular environment.

Parents with children can drop off their children at this facility and visit the shopping centre. Alternatively, they can enjoy sport activities either together or separately. The principle of this space is to move from “classical” to “numeric-
therapeutic” architecture:

•Reception – the classical reception would be replaced by terminals for entering patient data (if necessary) and/or by information terminals. Visitors will be able to retrieve links to informative sheets related to their problems and the treatments to follow.
•Office space – the space would no longer be partitioned; exchanges would be conducted in open spaces or in a self-service
cafeteria, but with silent zones to preserve patients’ privacy.
•Patio/landscape/urban architecture – interior and external gardens will be proposed for gardening, and for discovering medical herbs or plants that aren’t well-known, so that some patients could be treated with “horticultural therapy”. This environment could also be used for meditation. Medical herbs and plants could be used for dietary meals.
•Social space– space for different activities such as a cooking school, creative atelier, gardening, or DIY/Fablab will be dedicated to ergo-therapy and art therapy. A self-service cafeteria caters both for professionals and users to generate a familial ambiance.

These therapies aim to: help patients better manage (or forget) their illness; restructure their daily lives; help them recover confidence; and restore social ties.

Financial propositions: A partnership could be made with local shops, health professionals, and mutuals to finance different centres. Circular economy or shared economy principles will help deliver a decentralised, regional connected healthcare system and an “ageing in place” paradigm. A passive design system may be proposed to reduce energy consumption.