DESIGN AND QUALITY IN THE PROJECT FOR HEALTH BUILDINGS. The horizons of innovation

Introduction
For centuries, buildings for health care have often been considered as some of the highest moments of the architectonic discipline becoming a reference both from a compositional point of view and for technological contents.
In parallel, the issue of spaces in health care facilities has been continually stressed in the past since the concept of curing was born. It is well-known that Asclepiades of Bithynia wrote in 50 B.C. about the influence of dark places on sick recovery, and Florence Nightingale’s ideas explored the links between the environment and patient recovery (Tartaglia, 1998).
But the quality of spaces nowadays copes also with the fact that the speed of medical science evolution and of the transformation of social demands produces a quicker and quicker reduction in modern health building performances. In fact, as Romano Del Nord stressed in a conference in 2010¹ the “perturbations” that make hospitals obsolete and which call for renewal actions are increasingly frequent and sudden: evolution of the concept of health; biotechnology innovations; renewed hospital standards; changes in the way of providing care and assistance. […]