A
Sanatorium Separator - Restore to Health
Sanatorium Separator - Restore to Health
Navn
Elin Trommer
Uddannelsesgrad
Kandidat
Fagfelt
Arkitektur
Institut
Arkitektur og Kultur
Program
Political Architecture: Critical Sustainability
År
2026
In this project, the Separator, a modernist building in Katowice, Poland, is treated as a patient to be «restored to health». Its body is studied through its skin, scars, organs, and habits. Moving between examination, diagnosis, and treatment, the project translates medical methods into architectural interventions, proposing a playful way of seeing buildings as continuously living, changing, and in need of care.
Etymology of the word Sanatorium (from Merriam Webster Dictionary)
What is health?
Ideas of health and disease are constantly reshaped across time, cultures, religions, and geographies. Ideals of the healthy body shift with changing notions of wellness, normality, and longevity. So what does it mean to restore to health?
This project explores parallels between medicine and architecture, asking how the ways we understand and care for the human body are connected to how we design, maintain, transform, and demolish buildings.
Just as medicine diagnoses and treats the body, the project asks: What would it mean to treat a building as a patient? How do we restore a building to health?
From this, the project develops a set of methods based on seeing the building as a body and the Separator in Katowice as a patient.
THE PATIENT
Name: Separator
Age: 61 (constructed in 1965)
Architect: Stanisław Kwaśniewicz
Location: Near the market square along Korfantego Street
COLLAGE: ANAMNESIS/MEDICAL HISTORY
An anamnesis is a patient’s personal medical history, including current symptoms, past illnesses, and lifestyle details. This collage reads as an anamnesis of the Separator: a fragmented record of memory, intention, and adaptation. Original ideals of openness and progress appear alongside signs of wear, modification, and everyday survival.
The project moves between analysing the building’s medical history, examining symptoms, and exploring different diagnoses and treatments, translating medical practices into architectural and spatial interventions.
Through analogue drawings and physical models, the project emphasizes direct, sensory engagement with architecture, commenting on contemporary medical and architectural practices, where architects and doctors alike increasingly rely on scans, data, and screen-based diagnoses, while physical presence, touch, and learned craft become less central.
EXAMINATION THROUGH DRAWING
Facade as skin: This drawing reads the facade as skin, focusing on its surface conditions and visible signs of time.
Fragmented Scan: This drawings presents the building as a form of analytical cuts and scan. The drawing is revealing internal structures, layers, fragments that are not immediately visible, exposing the building’s internal systems. It is curious, opening up, revealing the inside fragment by fragment, trying to understand its condition through dissection and observation. The plan drawing investigates the experience of approaching and moving around the building at ground level. It reveals a fragmented urban condition shaped by parking, barriers, urban furniture, and unclear thresholds. The building appears difficult to access and navigate, with interrupted circulation. Covered windows, inactive edges, and underused transitional spaces contribute to a sense of withdrawal from the surrounding city. The plan exposes a weakened relationship between the building and public life.
The section drawing cuts through staircases, exposing the atmosphere of the building’s interior body.
Acupuncture: This drawing explores acupuncture as a method of architectural treatment. It maps a series of pressure points across the building, understood as: Zones of tension/pain (red), Zones of blockage (black), Zones of Pain relief/Potential (white). Rather than proposing large-scale interventions, the approach focuses on precise, localized treatments. By acting on these points, small changes are intended to trigger wider effects across the whole system. The drawing suggests that the building operates as an interconnected body, where each part influences the others, and where targeted interventions can support broader healing.
These photos are inverted interior photographs of the building, creating an x-ray-like reading of its internal spaces, allowing hidden conditions, layers to emerge.
Circulation: This drawing reads the site through the lens of circulation, where movement is understood as a vascular system. People are mapped as flows: blue representing internal movement - those who live and work on site - and red representing incoming movement that brings energy from outside. The yellow parking structures act as blockages, similar to clogged arteries, interrupting movement. By mapping this across three different timeframes, the drawing becomes a diagnostic tool. It tests how the system performs over time and under changing conditions.
The drawing explores how new “hearts” could be introduced or how existing ones could be activated and strengthened.
DIAGNOSTIC LANDSCAPE - 1:500
The model shows the operational boundary of the project along Korfantego Street in Katowice, centered around the Separator and its connected surrounding buildings.
Existing and archival photographs are embedded within the model, revealing different temporal layers of the site and exposing shifts in occupation, identity, and urban life over time.
Acupuncture needles are introduced as early exploratory interventions, inspired by the project’s acupuncture diagram and treatment studies.
The project does not search for a single solution or cure. Instead, it opens up a playful and curious investigation into how we understand health, and how we care for and relate to the built environment.
The project explains through exploring. Understanding emerges through the act of investigation.
Based on diagnoses of the heart and circulation system, the brain and nervous system, and the skin of the building, the catalogue explores a range of possible responses to the building’s condition. Drawing from different understandings of health, it investigates how different treatment philosophies might inform architectural intervention The treatments range from interventions such as heart transplantation to dermatological repair to psychotherapy. Some of them are tested in the 1:100 model. The catalogue functions as an exploratory framework through which the building can be studied, interpreted, and cared for from multiple perspectives.
“To experience architecture is to experience the body of another,
to enter into a dialogue with its memory,
its language, and its movement.”
to enter into a dialogue with its memory,
its language, and its movement.”
PROCESS
Det Kongelige Akademi understøtter FN’s verdensmål
Siden 2017 har Det Kongelige Akademi arbejdet med FN’s verdensmål. Det afspejler sig i forskning, undervisning og afgangsprojekter. Dette projekt har forholdt sig til følgende FN-mål
