Distinctly average. Built for no one.
This is part 1 of 2. Find Part 2 live on Monday.
(Yes, I borrowed the title from a House of Games game. Thanks, BBC).
We design almost every community health building for the average patient. But the average patient doesn’t exist.
One is 45 and one is 87. One arrived by car and one arrived by bus. One speaks English as a first language and one doesn’t. One of them has thirty minutes and one has all day because they’ve nowhere else to be. One is frightened and was up all night worrying. The other is relaxed and just wants to grab a coffee.
The idea of the ‘average patient’ – the everyone - is an insult to the extraordinary complexity of people and the different lives we all live.
Yet we keep designing for everyone, all the time.
Then we wonder why the buildings feel like they weren’t made for anyone in particular.
Because they weren’t.
They were made for everyone. Which, in design terms, is almost always the same thing as being made for no one.
The buildings people love
Buildings that people love - the ones they return to, the ones they grieve when they’re demolished, the ones that feel like they genuinely belong to the community around them - were not blandly designed for the ‘average’ person.
They were designed with a point of view.
With conviction.
With a willingness to make a choice and live with it.
They had the courage to say this is what we believe a healthy space should feel like - and we are going to commit to that, even if not everyone agrees.
That takes real courage.
It takes a client willing to back it.
It takes a design team willing to fight for something beyond ‘what we’ve had before – modernised’.
It takes enough creativity to rethink how the same funding gets used to create something of genuine health value - not clinical beige.
(And it takes a procurement process that doesn’t systematically remove every interesting decision before the building gets built).
We don’t have enough of any of those things.
The NHC opportunity
The Neighbourhood Health Centre (NHC) programme is one of the most significant investments in community health infrastructure in a generation.
Millions of pounds. Hundreds of buildings.
So many communities across the country will get investment in their local neighbourhoods.
It is an extraordinary opportunity to do something genuinely different. An opportunity to commission buildings with a point of view rather than a lowest common denominator.
To ask not just what services go inside, but what the building says to the street it sits on before anyone has walked through the door.
We will not get this moment again for a very long time.
The NHC programme is too important to be average.
So the question isn’t whether we can afford to be a little bit brave.
It’s whether we can afford not to be.
Part 2 coming next week. Sneak peek below:
“A health centre that’s not a bridge is just a building. We can do so much better than that.”
