The register

The Register of Buildings

The complete roster. Every entry is one building or one rule, and the theory of disease that produced it.

No.	Entry	Section	What it is
01	The pavilion plan	The Pavilion	Wards as separate parallel blocks joined by corridors, so that air could cross each one and never pass from one to the next — an entire hospital shaped by a diagram of ventilation.
02	Lariboisière	The Pavilion	The Paris hospital that made the pavilion argument concrete: Lariboisière turned a ventilation theory into stone and was studied by all.
03	Billings draws Baltimore	The Pavilion	John Shaw Billings planned Johns Hopkins around ventilation before germ theory settled, and the building opened in 1889 already halfway between two worlds.
04	What a pavilion cost to run	The Pavilion	Heating a building designed to leak air is expensive, and the accounts eventually decided the argument.
05	Miasma	Bad Air	For most of the nineteenth century, disease was believed to travel in foul air — and because the theory was wrong for the right reasons, the buildings it produced often worked.
06	The open window	Bad Air	Cross-ventilation as a medical instrument, with the window as the prescription.
07	Light as treatment	Bad Air	Sunlight was believed to be actively curative, which put wards on particular orientations.
08	Germ theory arrives	The Turn	Once infection had a mechanism, the reason for all that air disappeared, and the plan was free to become compact.
09	The sealed tower	The Turn	Lifts, mechanical ventilation and deep plans made height practical, and the hospital stopped being a landscape of separate blocks.
10	What was lost	The Turn	Daylight, view and orientation were traded for efficiency, and are now being argued back.
11	Paimio Sanatorium	Paimio	Alvar Aalto's 1933 building designed around a patient lying on their back: ceiling colours chosen for that view, heating placed to avoid draughts, and a basin shaped not to splash.
12	The sun balcony	Paimio	Rest cure architecture put beds outdoors in cold air, and the balcony became the building's whole south face.
13	Furniture as prescription	Paimio	Furniture as prescription: the Paimio chair was designed to open the sitter's chest, a medical claim made in bent plywood at Aalto's sanatorium.
14	Notes on Hospitals	Measures	Florence Nightingale published the ward as a set of numbers in 1859 — beds per ward, distance between them, window area, cubic feet of air per patient — and hospitals were built to those figures for decades.
15	Cubic feet per bed	Measures	A ventilation standard expressed as volume, and what it did to ceiling heights.
16	The ward round as a plan	Measures	Sightlines from the nurse's position shaped the long open ward as much as air did.

Where the weight of the register sits: the pavilion plan carries four entries, the other four sections three each.