Art: Womb with a View

With 28 medical clinic designs behind him, Seattle’s Paul Hayden Kirk, 42, has emerged as the West Coast architect who can design just what the doctors order. Two years ago a group of seven Seattle psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, banded together as the Blakeley Psychiatric Group, went to Architect Kirk with a special problem. As one of them stated (with some symptoms of frustration): “Situated in the business district and open to the distractions of an apartment hotel, we run a dismal gauntlet—slamming doors, dripping faucets, a view of an alley, rattling trucks and an s.o.b. who dotes on playing the banjo. Once my attention was taken from a patient by the sight of a whisky bottle swinging on a string outside my office window.” They wanted a new building custom-tailored to their needs.

Architect Kirk was eager to tackle their problem. A childhood victim of polio, he had long since come to the conclusion that “architecture can be medicine, or at least part of the therapy.” His answer is a long, low, $112,000 clinic building that bears no resemblance to standard medical surroundings. Patients arriving for their 50-minute hours last week were ushered through the Oregon-basalt entrance into the spacious waiting rooms, screened by a shoji. The long, sky-lit corridor (which has warm, hand-rubbed oak-flooring walls) leads to the ten consulting rooms, each soundproofed to silence, looks out through a full glass wall onto a serene, narrow garden court planted with vine maples and deciduous huckleberries, and backed by a plastic fence paneled in off-white, honey and burnt orange.

After the first week’s trial, one analyst last week stretched contentedly in the soft office chair, sighed: “I just can’t tell you how much less tired I’ve been feeling at the end of each working day.” As for the patients, one psychiatrist said: “I’d summarize patient reaction as a kind of ‘Wow!'” Another found a patient hesitant about “speaking terrible thoughts amid all this beauty,” but another patient looked around, exclaimed: “There’s something optimistic here.”

The reaction suited Architect Kirk right to the bottom of his T square. Said he: “It is too much to hope that the building itself can cure, but clearly it can be a symbol of health. I guess my psychiatric friends might say it’s a back-to-the-womb feeling. But then that’s been basic to all architecture since the comfort of the cave.”