These designs allow for quick construction and later reuse of large hospital wards. While such knowledge could aid in a pandemic at home, such wards were also sites of care and transmission of influenza during war. (Amongst the soldiers memorialized in the Bellefonte newspaper are those killed by the flu, as well as those killed during fighting.)

Even military plans included space for fresh air with a terrace attached to each ward structure.
Edward F. Stevens, “Our War Hospitals In France,” Architectural Record, March 1918, 257.

General ward of hospital complex: drawings show the site including over thirty ward buildings as one function of a field hospital

 

Charles Over Cornelius, “The Liberty Field Hospital Ward,” Architectural Record, September 1918, 269.

Multi-unit field hospital: note the porch for fresh air

 

Single unit for later residential use

 

 

Howard Dwight Smith, “Barracks Group and Hospital for the U.S. Army School of Military Aeronautics at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, Joseph N. Bradford, Architect,” Architectural Record, November 1918, 387.

Exterior: the outermost walls act as a screen for a porch

Plan: the wards are more compartmentalized in this design while the porch nearly wraps the entire structure

 

Further readings on hospitals:

Innovations in Hospital Architecture
Stephen Verderber

Architecture and the Modern Hospital: Nosokomeion to Hygeia
Julie Willis, Philip Goad, and Cameron Logan

Medicine By Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943
Annmarie Adams

Healing Waters: Therapeutic Landscapes in Historic and Contemporary Ireland
Ronan Foley

Sustainable Healthcare Architecture
Robin Guenther and Gail Vittori

Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870-1940
Jeanne Kisacky

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body
edited by Sarah Schrank and Didem Ekici