What is health? 

Ideas of health and disease are constantly reshaped across time, cultures, religions, and geographies. Ideals of the healthy body shift with changing notions of wellness, normality, and longevity. So what does it mean to restore to health?

This project explores parallels between medicine and architecture, asking how the ways we understand and care for the human body are connected to how we design, maintain, transform, and demolish buildings.

Just as medicine diagnoses and treats the body, the project asks: What would it mean to treat a building as a patient? How do we restore a building to health? 

From this, the project develops a set of methods based on seeing the building as a body and the Separator in Katowice as a patient.

THE PATIENT

Name: Separator 

Age: 61 (constructed in 1965) 

Architect: Stanisław Kwaśniewicz

Location: Near the market square along Korfantego Street 

The project moves between analysing the building’s medical history, examining symptoms, and exploring different diagnoses and treatments, translating medical practices into architectural and spatial interventions.

Through analogue drawings and physical models, the project emphasizes direct, sensory engagement with architecture, commenting on contemporary medical and architectural practices, where architects and doctors alike increasingly rely on scans, data, and screen-based diagnoses, while physical presence, touch, and learned craft become less central.

The project does not search for a single solution or cure. Instead, it opens up a playful and curious investigation into how we understand health, and how we care for and relate to the built environment.

The project explains through exploring. Understanding emerges through the act of investigation.