Controlled studies confirm what cancer patients know intuitively: contact with the natural environment alleviates stress, relaxes blood pressure, and even reduces the need for pain medication. So it is not surprising that many designers strive to organize cancer centers around natural vistas.

In suburban and rural areas, the natural world is near at hand and a cancer center can be surrounded by a garden or a grove of trees. But in urban areas – or on densely developed hospital campuses – the available vistas may be the side of a building, the air handling units on a rooftop, or a sea of parked cars.

In the 1980s, environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich was the first to document the restorative effect of nature on patients in the hospital. Using modern research methods with strict experimental controls, he observed that patients in rooms with window views of trees needed less pain medication, had fewer postsurgical complications, and spent less time in the hospital than those with views of a brick wall. Indeed, on average, they left the hospital a full day earlier.

Other studies measuring blood pressure, muscle tension and heart and brain electrical activity have determined that even three to five minutes spent looking at views dominated by trees, flowers or water can “begin to reduce anger, anxiety and pain, and to induce relaxation.”

It doesn’t even have to be an actual tree. Art work of nature can have a similar soothing effect, whether it is a floor-to-ceiling photograph of a wooded stream or a small framed painting of a […]