Michel Rémon & Associés

Our work methodologies are oriented to design practical, welcoming and caring institutions. The Atelier seeks to design - with the patients - hospitals for users.

The Atelier Michel Rémon & Associés approach is a architecture/medicine dual action which encourages the integration of informed knowledge, practical experience at several levels of discussion and decision-making.

Architecture is no longer from the top down. Programmes are increasingly detailed according to the demographic and geographical specificities of the projects. Architects should take into account the specificities and priorities that drive project development. Today, the consultation of users is widely acclaimed in order to design suitable projects.

In medicine, the growing number of chronically ill patients (approximately 20 million people in France) is leading the health field to rethink its practices. The chronically ill should organise their existence to integrate the repercussions of the illness in both personal and emotional as well as social or professional spheres. These extensively tested improvements seek to find new and personalised lifestyles whereby everyone can lead a daily life that suits them and to project themselves with confidence into the future.

Confronted with a medicine that is sometimes experienced as top-down and paternalistic, some chronically ill people have expressed a liberating message to affirm expertise on their body, their illness and treatment. Today, medicine centred on the patient asserts itself, where patient and medical staff make up two poles of a complementary relationship in which requirements and knowledge circulate and adjust to provide care adapted to the individual.

If the chronically ill participate in their care and retain information essential for therapy, their experience should also be taken into account in the design of the buildings that concern them. To the “ Rien sur nous sans nous” spelt out by the patient, the Atelier responds with a committed architectural response.

The philosophy takes seriously a problem that arises in reality and the responsibility to deal with it.

On one hand, it exposes the architectural profession and its practices to philosophical thought to discover initiatives that make architecture a provider of care and well-being.

On the other, it integrates what the philosophy tells us about the hospital to improve architectural practice.

For many patients, hospitalisation is a time of active self-exploration to familiarise themselves with their body and its capabilities, to integrate the illness into their identity and establish appropriate lifestyle behaviours - to be able to browse and wander around in order to take back their everyday life.

Architecture should provide a variety of spaces, testing grounds for people to develop these new lifestyles. It should also be designed as a permanent structure, landmark and protection to accommodate these changes and explorations.

These studies invite us to rethink the hospital as a health care facility and as time/space whose care value is to return the patient in continuity with life.

Philosophical examination helps to understand what health and illness mean precisely to the individuals concerned and it completes a strictly medical description of situations. The research focuses on the sensations of chronically ill patients in respect to their body and space. Listening to them makes it possible to understand when they are obstructed by unsuitable or even disabling spaces. It also makes it possible to analyse how some patients adapt to reset their relationship to space in order to get out of a disabling situation.

Recording these experiences identifies the facilitating elements to replicate in health care facilities. These elements are atmospheres, environments and relationships to the world that are constructed by the architecture. If the patient feels cut off from the world, the treatment helps him to re-establish ties. Hospital architecture accompanies this movement by making resources available to the patient.

To assist treatment, the architecture can facilitate the relationship between the world and the individual, the presentation of the landscape made accessible to the person, the imposition of individual scale within the collective scale which accommodate and to which they belong. By taking into consideration the circulations, the proximities and encounters it builds, architecture brings together the various elements, connects man to his environment.