By Healthcare Facilities Today

The Crown Sky Garden, on the 11th floor of the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, is a 5,000-square-foot area for play and contemplation and the second healing garden completed last year by Mikyoung Kim. Kim, a landscape architect, is regarded as an artful weaver of nature and sculpture, according to an article in The New York Times.  In the Q&A, Kim talks about the philosophy and process behind a healing garden.

NYT: How do you define a healing garden?

Kim: It allows for us to reboot. I think that a lot of our public environments don’t really offer us that.

NYT:  Certainly not in hospitals.

Kim: Overall, a kind of stress management happens. It’s something we all know intuitively. We go to a place that’s quiet and inviting, and we can just feel our body relaxing. I think at the highest level, hospital administrators are really beginning to believe that design matters and they’re infusing a kind of humanity into these clinical environments.

NYT:  So “clinical” is something to be avoided.

Kim: It’s an interesting word. We want our health-care professionals to be objective and not emotional in assessing our state of being. But at the same time there’s a growing awareness that clinical environments work against the good work that doctors do — that they may actually increase stress levels, not only in patients but in their families.

Read the article.