Research has shown that when it comes to treating the sick, the better the environment, the better the treatment and speedier the recovery - something hospitals are finally putting into practice.
At the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, an aquarium is implanted into a lobby wall. Freshwater fish flit through the 800-gallon tank, flashing their brilliant scales. They are oblivious to the pain, the sadness, the disease inherent in a facility such as this.

The patients, and friends and family thereof, however, are all too aware of it, and that's why the aquarium is joined by others in waiting rooms, by a cafeteria lined with glass tiles in shades of the sea, by balcony gardens and landscape paintings. In designing this building and another new one next door, M.D. Anderson has included features shown by scientific research to reduce stress, speed healing, even improve staff productivity. The backlit scenes of fall leaves and cherry blossoms in the radiation-therapy suites, the transparent pipes full of bubbles in a waiting room, the staff hallways and waiting rooms flooded with natural light: All of it is intended to conform the hospital's environment to its healing mission.

It's called evidence-based design, a new effort in healthcare to apply science to construction. For the first time, research about how patients and hospital staff respond to their environment is being synthesized into bricks and mortar. It's a recognition that how patients feel about their treatment can be as important to recovery as the treatment itself, and how their doctors and nurses feel about their workplace molds their on-the-job performance and productivity.