Robin Guenther, architect of healthy hospitals, dies at age 68

Robin Guenther, an architect and environmental health advocate who designed green, sustainable healthcare facilities and co-authored the first guide to building them, died May 6 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 68.

The cause was ovarian cancer, said her husband, Perry Gunther. (The couple’s surnames shared a pronunciation, but no spelling.)

Ms. Guenther, a New York City-based architect who began designing healthcare facilities after graduating from architecture school in the late 1970s, was among a group of environmentalists and architects who began campaigning against the use of toxic materials in the 1990s in construction. .

She was particularly focused on PVC, or polyvinyl chloride, one of the world’s most ubiquitous plastics — used in everything from pipes to flooring to medical devices — and a known human carcinogen. Mr. Guenther began looking for alternatives and lecturing and writing about their dangers.

When she founded her firm, Guenther 5 Architects, in 2001, her mission was to take the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm first, said Chris Youssef, an interior designer and sustainable design consultant who worked with Ms. Guenther at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn in the early 2000s, which was built with a minimal amount of toxic materials.

Ms. Guenther’s awareness of PVC proved to be the first step in her understanding of the full health and environmental impacts of healthcare facilities. She and others began cataloging those impacts, including carbon emissions (hospitals are energy intensive); jumbled layouts illuminated by artificial lighting that affected healthcare workers and patients alike; and materials, including PVC, that can harm the health of the communities where they are manufactured and the areas where they are used.

Ms. Guenther was one of many architects who advocated sustainable and resilient building, for example using renewable energy sources and designing buildings that could survive the extreme weather conditions of climate change. And she practiced what is now called regenerative or restorative design, creating spaces that promote health with natural light sources and access to nature, and that connect to and sustain the surrounding community.

“She changed the nature of health care construction,” says Bill Walsh, the founder of the Healthy Building Network, one of many environmental organizations that had Ms. Guenther as a board member and advisor. He added that she had been a leader in designing strategies for removing vinyl from buildings. “She wasn’t all sizzling and not steak,” he said.

One of her notable works was the Discovery Center in Harris, NY, a 27,000-square-foot Westchester County treatment facility for children and adults with severe neurological disorders that opened in 2002. The structureairy and barn-like, it is made from renewable, non-toxic materials and is heated and cooled by a geothermal system.

In 2003, Ms. Guenther worked with a team that included Gail Vittori, a sustainability expert who had designed green building policies, protocols and standards since the 1980s, and Tom Lent, then the Healthy Building Network’s policy director, created the Green Guide for Healthcare, a set of environmentally conscious, health-based building standards tailored for the healthcare industry.

Modeled after the US Green Building Council’s LEED certification program for assessing sustainability in buildings, the guide covered a wide variety of topics, including avoiding toxic chemicals, the importance of natural light to support circadian rhythms, and the need to rest areas and connections with nature.

In its second year of release, the guide had been downloaded 11,000 times in every U.S. state and more than 80 countries. It became the basis for LEED certification specifically for healthcare.

Still, skeptics believed that green building in healthcare would be prohibitively expensive. So Ms. Guenther, Ms. Vittori and others conducted two studies that showed that these projects cost almost as much as conventional projects. In 2007, Ms. Guenther and Ms. Vittori published “Sustainable Healthcare Architecture”, which included case studies of more than 50 projects. In 2014, Ms. Guenther gave a TedMed talk titled “Why Hospitals Make Us Sick”, which has been viewed tens of thousands of times.

In an email, Mr Lent said that “Robin understood on a deep level the responsibility of the architect, engineer and interior designer (basically everyone involved in bringing buildings into the world) for the health, environmental and social impact of the materials they specified and the designs they created.”

He added that she had “worked tirelessly to awaken the healthcare industry and the design and construction companies that work with them to this responsibility.”

Robin Gail Guenther was born on October 2, 1954 in Detroit. Her mother, Elinor (Brown) Guenther, was a housewife and her father, Robert Guenther, was an executive at the Ford Motor Company. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and a degree from the Architectural Association in London.

In addition to her husband, to whom she was married for 38 years, Mrs. Guenther by her stepdaughters, Jyllian Gunther and Nicole Palms, two granddaughters, and her sisters, Lynn Monahan and Sharon Barnes.

In 2007, Guenther 5 Architects, in Lower Manhattan, where she also lived, was acquired by Perkin & Will, a global architectural firm; Ms. Guenther led the global health practice.

At Perkins & Will, she oversaw projects such as the Memorial Sloan Kettering Monmouth Ambulatory Care Center (aka MSK Monmouth) in New Jersey, a reinvention of a drab 1980s office building in an airy space overlooking the woods; and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford in Palo Alto, California, which opened in 2017 and won a Healthcare Design Award from the American Institute of Architects. It features abundant natural light, water recovery systems for landscape irrigation, a shading system to reduce the need for air conditioning, recycled building materials and a healing garden.

In 2012, Ms. Guenther was one of Fast Company’s magazines “100 Most Creative People in Business.” It noted that she developed 12 maxims of good design practice and printed them on posters she hung around her workspaces.

“If you don’t know what’s in it, you probably don’t want what’s in it,” one read. Another said, “Consult your nose – if it stinks, don’t use it.”