Three decades after it first provided refuge for people dying from HIV/AIDS, Toronto's Casey House is now the world's only freestanding HIV/AIDS hospital, according to an article on the Globe and Mail website.
Casey House now has a new building of its own, a 59,000-square-foot wing appended to a Victorian manse.
The central question, according to the project architect, was: "How do we create the sense of something between a home and a hospital?"
The building's layout is different from most hospitals. Those are usually organized around double-loaded corridors – a hallway lined with rooms on either side, leaving nurses and other staff trapped in the sunless centre of a building. Casey House as taken that typical plan and carved a skinny courtyard down the middle; it allows light to penetrate into the center of the building.