This study attempts to understand cultural impacts on nursing unit design through a comparative study on Chinese nursing unit typologies and their U.S. counterparts. The focus is to investigate whether seemingly westernized Chinese nursing units still retained certain characteristics of Chinese socio-cultural preferences; and how configurational differences of Chinese and American nursing unit design reflect the different work styles and organizational communication styles driven by national culture. This study’s contributions are twofold. Firstly, it demonstrates the impact of national culture on nursing unit design. The spatial configuration is a manifesto of culture and is congruent with culture. Secondly, from a methodological point of view, this study has translated abstract cultural schema, organizational constructs, and complex spatial relationships into quantitative spatial metrics. It makes the comparison of various building configurations from different cultures possible. The method and conceptual framework described here can be applied to understanding cultural differences in other building types as well.
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