Design evolution of the childhood care and assistance through the Twentieth Century in Europe

This paper deals with the evolution of the pediatric hospitals from an architectural point of view starting from the early Twentieth Century. Furthermore the architectonic organization is strictly related to the spread of infectious diseases because until the half of the last century the mortality rate of hospedalized children was very high. The primary concern of pediatric hospitals was so to limit and to impede as much as possible hospital contagion. To separate the areas dedicated to treatment and hospitalization, and to build separate and isolated pavilions, ventilated and surounded by unencumbered green areas, are some of the building solutions that have been realized in the past. The model of pavilion hospital was so determined, and dominated hospital constructions until the 1960’s-1970’s. Although hospital contagion still represents an important problem today in pediatric hospitals due to the fragile nature of the patients, at the beginning of the century doctors, when faced with wide-spread contagion due to the ineffectiveness of the treatment of infections, consolidated the practice of separating the ill, subdividing the hospital wards into “cubicles”, i.e. small individual rooms in place of large common rooms. In this paper the different solutions are analysed and the main architectural models are compared.