A thing of beauty heals us all

UNIVERSITY College Hospital is a sin against the London skyline.

Its pale green iridescence seems calculated to evoke unpleasant body fluids. But at least the trustees who run it have had the imagination to try to beautify it with works of art.

UCH, despite its angular outline, has acquired an inspiring threshold, The Monolith, by sculptor John Aiken. The controversial rock that now glows at the entrance is a sublime work of nature: a uniquely variegated stone, a treasure trove of precious and semiprecious stones, compacted by the power of the Earth, and now polished to a high sheen. It is an example that all hospitals should learn from.

Hospitals make you sick. It's not just that they are nurseries of germs and - in Britain, at least - breedinggrounds of filth: the real problem goes deeper. We have made the mistake - for some patients, a fatal error - of building hospitals for economic efficiency rather than for health.

Modern hospitals are inhumanly hi-tech. We construct vast, hostile, noisy buildings, then cram them with pokey partitions and oppressive heating and air-conditioning.

They are glum places to inhabit. Even if they cure your body, they leave you sick in your very soul. They need inspired rethinking to make them welcoming and comforting. That is what UCH has shown with the installation of its giant pebble.

Medical fashions come and go. Today's wonder-drug turns out to have killer side-effects.

The latest antibiotic soon proves useless as micro-organisms adapt to it.

Diagnoses get more and more dodgy as the quality of doctors declines.

BUT give a patient a berth in a lovely space, of generous, elegant proportions, enveloped by calm and soothed by fresh air, and you will have someone who not only feels better, but who also has the chance to think and reflect and fight the battle against disease in the mind - which is a source of strength the body cannot supply.

If you can't afford to put your patients in generous spaces, at least supply them with art to contemplate and objects to interest and enthral them. Beauty is the only universal therapy - the only nostrum that genuinely makes everyone feel better.

Objects of eternal value, which the human spirit has infused with love and care and craft, have more power of healing than the roundest pill or the sharpest scalpel. That is the power of UCH's rock.

Human minds have transformed it into art, by shaping and polishing it and investing ideas in it. It symbolises the way the component units of the hospital have combined in one structure. It draws on ancient traditions of healing.

It welcomes the patient with assurances of enduring values. It comforts the suffering and encourages the carers with a reminder of the qualities they need: constancy, harmony, solidity, allroundedness, a smooth and soothing touch.

Of course, there is a bottom line. The hospital's rock cost Pounds 70,000. The money was subscribed by private charity and by that wonderful medical foundation, the King's Fund, precisely in order to enrich the environment.

But critics insist that the cash would be better spent elsewhere. London, it seems, is full of philistines who would rather spend the money enriching a drug company or acquiring some instantly obsolescent tinpot technology, or piling up placebos, or employing more ill-trained and vocationless personnel.

The Sun predictably dismissed those responsible as "off their rockers".

One of the objections is that, though the stone is there to welcome patients, hospital inmates can't see it from their beds. In other words, it is public art, open to every passerby. And everyone generous enough to contribute to the enhancement of London's streets and squares has to endure the catcalls of dullsouled, compulsively dreary fellow-citizens whose warped values make them insensitive to art.

Other cities are not like this.

Now that I spend most of my time working in Boston, Massachusetts, I shed a Londoner's tears when I think of my home town. America is full of public-spirited individuals and foundations, with enough civic pride to pay for public art. Other Americans honour them for it. Londoners need to start thinking the same way.

How do they suppose ancient Athens or imperial Rome or Renaissance Florence got beautiful? The world's finest urban spaces were not confections of tyranny or bureaucracy, but the outcome of enlightened priorities on the part of public benefactors.

During the reception of the Renaissance in Seville, private individuals and artloving corporations actually bought up slums to demolish them and create public plazas. In London today, it's the other way round: rich men buy up spaces and build exploitable excrescences.

YET public art is vital for enhancing life. For some people, it is the only art they get.

They may shun museums, read red-tops, eat junk, watch no-brain telly, and stuff their ears with iPods with the bass turned up, but they can't avoid seeing fine buildings, grand squares, well- designed street furniture and magnificent sculpture on their way to work or school.

They may have no other chance to open their eyes to beauty or elevate mind or spirit through the power of art.

Yet how much of these glories does London give them, compared with other great cities in Europe and the Americas? London yields to no metropolis in the world for vibrancy or opportunity or gut- pleasures, but it is way down in the beauty stakes.

The objectors to UCH's generous initiative are wrong.

Beauty heals us all.

(c)2005. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.