The word hospitium originally refers to a monastery, or a part of a monastery, that offered shelter to pilgrims and travellers. It was a space rooted in monastic hospitality, a place of welcome, rest, and temporary belonging. Literally, the word means guesthouse.
A modern hospice carries this lineage forward in a different yet deeply related way. A hospice is usually a house-like environment dedicated to terminal care. People who are incurably ill can be cared for here until the end of their lives.
Unlike a hospital, whose atmosphere is often dominated by clinical routines and technological urgency, the hospice offers a domestic, intimate setting, one that allows dying to remain part of lived experience rather than being reduced to a medical procedure.
At the same time, professional medical care remains present and accessible. In the Netherlands, physician Jan Aernout van der Does de Willebois was one of the pioneers of this approach, helping to establish the hospice as a humane alternative to hospital-based death care.
A hospice, therefore, provides a place where people can die in a home-like environment when dying at home is no longer possible. Residents are supported not only by medical staff but also by family members, volunteers, nurses, and caregivers. Together with the residents themselves, these caregivers form the core of the hospice community.
The central architectural theme of this design is intertwining, the spatial and emotional weaving together of these two groups: those who are dying and those who are caring for them.
The spatial interlacing of these two volumes produces a dynamic sequence of routes and changing sightlines. Movement through the building becomes slow, layered, and relational. At every turn, one senses both separation and connection: the possibility of privacy, and the reassurance of presence. In this way, guests and caregivers alike can feel sheltered, oriented, and gently held within a shared architectural fabric.
The hospice thus becomes not only a place of care, but a place of meaningful coexistence, where architecture supports the fragile, complex choreography of farewell.
w/ ingrid van zanten
