Focusing on downtown Toronto, Alexandra Chow's project Integrating Therapeutic Landscape into Urban Health Care explores how landscape, urban streetscape, and medical facility can be integrated into a homogenized infrastructure promoting health and well being. The idea under the microscope here is that the mega-hospital—the immense complex style of many of today's medical facilities—needs to broaden its interests beyond the traditional "cure the patient" approach to address prevention, education and ongoing treatment of all participants in the healthcare system. How, Chow asks, can urban landscapes promote physical therapy? Can healing be brought out of the hospitals and into retrofitted streets for greater health benefit and illness prevention?

This year's winners will be formally recognized at HEALTHCARE DESIGN.08 in Washington, D.C., this week on November 10, 2008 and were shown in October's issue of Contract Magazine.