Iria Suarez Martinez

Designing Health: Urban Spaces for Sick Children, 1850-1914

I am a LAHP-funded PhD candidate at the V&A and Royal College of Art in the History of Design programme. As a design historian, I am researching the history of the design of children’s hospitals in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. My thesis, ‘Designing Health: Urban Spaces for Sick Children, 1850-1914’, investigates how and why paediatric spaces were designed, and considers their impact on histories of health and child development in the modern city. As a designer, I am working within the fields of architecture and urban planning. I am interested in the impact that space and materiality have on people’s health, as well as in the use of participatory methods in design processes and placemaking. 

My supervisors are Dr Simona Valeriani, V&A, and Dr Josephine Kane, RCA.

Selected publications and presentations

‘A Better Childhood for all Children: Designing the Modern Space for Sick Children in East London, 1850–1900’, presentation for Barts Health NHS Trust Archives and Museums, August 2021 

Book review of Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870-1940 by Jeanne Kisacky in Technology and Culture 62, no. 1 (2021), pp. 282–3  

‘Florence Nightingale, Victorian design and the treatment of Covid-19′, web article for the Wellcome Collection, 24 November 2020 

‘A Better Childhood for all Children: Designing the Modern Space for Sick Children in East London, 1850–1900’, presentation at the European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC), 24 March 2021