Past & present - reuse of early 20th century hospitals

What we lose by converting early-20th century hospitals to inappropriate new uses or demolishing them is the dignified civic presence of these institutions.

There are significant links between hospitals of the past and today's institutions:

• both intend/intended hospital spaces to look comforting and homelike, not hard edged and high tech - the  current 'arranged marriage' of domesticity and high technology is one of the paradoxes of postmodern architecture, and a central idea behind post 1980s hospital architecture. Hospitals of the 1950s and 1960s tended to look like office buildings but contemporary hospital architecture tends to draw on elements of domestic, hotel and shopping mall design. Technology (and parking) is disguised.
• the collision of architectural and medical reasoning - architecture frequently draws on precedents and case studies while modern medicine looks more towards the future (though is based on prior research)

Summarised from
Adams, Annmarie. Medicine by Design. The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2008