Behind the eye-catching design of the 969,000-square-foot Rey Juan Carlos Hospital in the Madrid suburb of M'stoles, Spanish architect Rafael de La-Hoz has created a therapeutic atmosphere, organizing the building around accessible atria that help orient patients and immerse them in a protective, inward-looking environment.

Along Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue, buses and cyclists whiz by to the sounds of car horns, laughing children, and the occasional jazz quartet.

Michael Folonis reacted with baffled delight when he was chosen to design the 50,000-square-foot, three-story UCLA Outpatient Surgery and Medical Building in Santa Monica.

In recent years the design of hospitals that emulate hotels has generated a warming trend in this often forbiddingly cold, institutional building type.

The first challenge in designing the Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation for Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital began with the location.

In a sunlit lab filled with genotyping equipment, Dr. Christof von Kalle and colleagues at the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) plumb the secrets of cellular mechanisms that create cancers.