It is not a hospital, a clinic or a health organisation of any kind, and it does not speak for one. There is no advice here about anybody’s health, and nothing on these pages should be read as any.
The subject is narrower than it sounds. For most of the nineteenth century, hospitals were built on the belief that illness travelled in bad air, and that belief produced a specific and extraordinary kind of building: the pavilion plan — long narrow wards set apart in rows so that a cross-draught could sweep through them, windows on both walls, beds spaced by rule. Florence Nightingale set the ward down in figures in Notes on Hospitals in 1859. Lariboisière in Paris and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore are the built arguments.
Then germ theory arrived, the reason for all that air evaporated, and the building went vertical and sealed. Alvar and Aino Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium, opened in 1933, is the hinge: sun balconies, a basin designed not to splash, a ceiling colour chosen for someone lying on their back.
Every entry in the register is one building or one rule, and the theory of disease that produced it. Buildings are named with their city; architects and authors are named where the record is clear. Nothing here is invented — no dates, no drawings, no attributions.