creative process - our vision

Creating Healing Spaces

Initially, our vision for the new hospital was inspired in the main by the need to avoid the mistakes of the past. To put the project on a more positive footing, the Project Director first needed to address the financial situation. The old Glasgow Homoeopathic Hospital was run down and neglected having been in continuous use for 80 years. Money for the replacement had accumulated in an endowment started in the 1930s and added to, over the years, from the proceeds of jam sales, coffee mornings and generous donations.

Before 1994, there had been three unsuccessful attempts to replace the hospital, but each one had fallen foul of NHS procedures. For though the NHS would own the finished building, it was only able to offer the hospital a disused area of land on which to build, but no funds to build with.

However, Jane Herbert the then new Chief Executive of the local NHS Trust showed great courage in permitting a medical consultant Dr David Reilly to become Project Director and the NHS Trusts and Estates Department were prepared to adapt to the new working practices he wished to institute.

Using beauty and healing as his reference points, Dr David Reilly set out to create a building that would not only have art, but be art. While ideas vary on what constitutes beauty in art, the Design Team, following consultations with patients and staff, looked for inspiration from the natural world since this is universally accepted as beautiful.

“We were determined from the very beginning that the hospital would be art, not have art.”

Dr David Reilly, Project Director