A Study on the Spatial Hierarchy of Low-Rise Spaces in Large Geriatric Hospitals

Abstract

With the aging of society, facilities for the elderly are becoming larger and more subdivided functionally due to increased demand, but the quality of such facilities remains low. In particular, in geriatric hospitals, there has been difficulty in spatial planning due to the combination of a special target, i.e. the elderly, and a special facility, i.e. a hospital. This study builds basic data for the design of a large geriatric hospital by analyzing the spatial structure of low-rise spaces of a large geriatric hospital. To achieve this objective, this study utilized space syntax, a kind of spatial hierarchy analysis method, to analyze the accessibility and cognition of a unit space. The conclusions are as follows. 1) The J-Graph of an Outpatient department in the hospital selected in this study has a tree type, which indicates that its space is designed to be suitable for outpatients. 2) Looking at the subdivisions of the Outpatient department in detail, the deviation between the highest and lowest value of connectivity tends to be larger. 3) The reception desks and information desks in a large geriatric hospital need to have a high restriction, but some hospitals showed low values. 4) The spatial structure intelligibility derived in this study sometimes shows a value of 0.6 or less due to the increase in a convex unit space, which is the result of the enlargement and subdivision of a geriatric hospital. However, it is considered that the simple enlargement of a hospital does not cause this problem; the low spatial structure intelligibility is caused by the arrangement and hierarchy of convex unit spaces. As such, when designing a large geriatric hospital, it is necessary to consider the spatial hierarchy and cognition of a space to design a moving line hierarchy that is suitable for the elderly.