Lila Bonneau

During her professional career, Lila discovered the importance of environment of therapeutic treatment issues at Sainte-Anne, hospital founded in 1867(MH). She carries out her investigations a dissertation on the city of Saint-Maurice and its hospital heritage and, at the request of the AP-HP in 2021, faced with the necessary transformations and reconversions of the hospital built heritage, an expertise of the Beaujon hospital in Clichy and the Bichat hospital, Paris. She will develop it in her doctoral thesis (published in 2021 Ed. Hermann): “From the origin to the future of 20th century therapeutic architecture and its environments: the Beaujon hospital in Clichy (1930-2021)”. First high-rise hospital in Europe built in 1935 following North American models after the first international congress of hospitals held in Atlantic City in 1929. For Lila, it was an introduction to the architecture of American hospital establishments. Previously, for two months, in North America, she had been able to study thanks to a grant from the French Academy, the development of hospitals across the Atlantic between the wars and that of the Beaujon hospital. She had established contacts on this subject in 15 Canadian cities she had been invited to McGill University in Montreal.

As a post-doctoral fellow, he was entrusted with the task of assessing the transformation of the American Memorial Hospital (Reims University Hospital) : a children's hospital with Art Deco decor and the therapeutic garden (1925) created thanks to the investment of American women. The transformation of this hospital is still being carried out in conjunction with the Americans. During her 6-month fellowship in the United States : she will examine the works of architects and urban planners about the impact of the environment on human health in the United States, at Cornell Medical, from the agency Coolidge, the Lovell Health House in Los Angeles, (by Richard Neutra), those of the Laboratory on landscape and human health from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne.

She will observe the methods of transformation and restoration of hospital sites such as the Art Deco megahospitals, the County Hospital of Los Angeles and that of New Orleans.

As well as the demolition of others such as Chicago's Prentice Women's Hospital. The question of re-using obsolete hospitals implies a choice in the in the United States as in France: for example, Caen Hospital which is collapsing or to rescue them by classification as heritage monuments for respect the “spirit of the place”. In the United-States of America, nearly five hundred hospitals appear int the National Register Act.

Lila broadens the scope of her research:  in addition to respecting heritage, improving places of care, she takes into account parenthood and the facilities of surroundings of the hospitals. As she did in France through the project carried out in her French-Spanish agency MàaPa and presented in July 2023 to the European Competition: “Reconversion of a hospital area from the second half of the 20th century dedicated to parenthood, mother and child”. Lila will take advantage of her American stay, notably to the Boston Children's Hospital and its therapeutic garden, to large her subject.

Lila thinks that the landscape context, the outside world, the climate, must be taken into account in hospitals, in care homes, health centers, day hospitals, medical-educational institutes. Improving the habitability of living and health environments of populations by respecting the medical, social and human architectural history of previous generations is an almost universal cause for our time in which Lila has been engaged since the beginning of her professional career...

Lila will share her experiences in France and North America as she does very widely in France through numerous symposia, lectures and her university teaching with great specialists such as Donato Severo, or Richard Klein.