Thesis Research: Inspiration and Passion

Posted on: September 1st, 2011

My name is Emily Dunne and I am currently entering into my final year as a full-time student enrolled in the master of architecture program, concentrating in real estate development at the Catholic University of America. I remember the first day I arrived at CUA for classes I received a phone call whisking me away to the Brigham and Women's ICU in Boston. Certain events in the last few years have inspired me to pursue a thesis research project exploring spaces of rehabilitation and healing, in service to doctors, families and patients in the medical industry, to provide clear, calm and comfortable spaces to those with illness and those who support them.

In the summer of 2009 my father was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and in August and was given one month to live. In September the doctors induced a coma and gave him one week to live while we waited for a transplant. On Labor day weekend, just hours before he would run out of survival time in the ICU, a donor lung was found and my father went to surgery. On the way to the operating room his breathing and heart stopped, he was revived, received the transplant and lived, only to develop lymphoma around Christmas from a disease (Epstein-Barr virus) that came in with the donor lung. Throughout the year my family supported my father while he battled and overcame stage IV cancer. In the same year two other members of my immediate family battled cancer in various stages and places. Amazingly every health battle has been won and God willing we may now relax a little as a family.

In the past two years I have spent countless hours in St. Elizabeth’s respiratory patient rooms, the Brigham and Women’s ICU, the Brigham and Women’s pulmonary wing, the Dana Farber Cancer Center waiting areas and treatment rooms, the New England Sinai Rehabilitation Center and the chemo and radiation treatment rooms and waiting areas at the Lahey Clinic in Massachusetts. I have experienced and observed the emotional trauma that comes with seemingly fatal illness and the hospital spaces that enhance or diminish the stress that patients, families and even doctors encounter.

I have experience interning with Tsoi-Kobus and Associates from 2008-2009 as a member of the Duke University Cancer Center Addition team among other medical projects. Our firm designed the new wing at Brigham and Women’s that I passed through every day on the way to visit the ICU. I understand medical facilities from the perspective of both designer and the user and I want to spend my final year as a graduate student sharpening my understanding of medical facilities on the macro, structural and developmental level. I would like my thesis to focus on a health care facility development, most probably realized as a rehabilitation facility.

In conclusion I hope this research will inform developers in the architecture and medical industries. The studies for thesis will address the human scale and ethos and the environment as much as function, efficiency or sterility. I want to show my gratitude to those who shaped my life and the lives of my family and share an understanding of space that will contribute to outstanding medical facilities globally.