Ronald McDonald House garners star architects, criticism

Six-month-old baby Elai smiles and kicks his little feet when people speak. "The doctors say it's the sick children who are most friendly," Elai's mother Tatyana Fornoff says, despite the constant prodding and pricking of needles.

Elai has lived in the intensive care unit in Cologne's Children's Hospital all his life. After an emergency C-section, Elai was born four weeks premature. His esophagus wasn't formed, and today he breathes, wheezing rhythmically, through a valve that protrudes from his throat. Within days of Elai's birth last July, the Fornoff family had packed its bags and moved into the Ronald McDonald House in Cologne.

Tatyana Fornoff, 28, said the Ronald McDonald House literally helped keep her family together

"When you're in a situation where you think your own child might die, or you don't know how to keep going, then a place like this is truly a second home," Fornoff says. "You can't imagine how much a house like this relieves some of the burden by offering a place to shower, to do laundry, to rest."

Tatyana cradles the baby from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day, now and then placing him in his bassinet, to which he is connected to by a series to tubes that drain the fluid from his esophagus.

Her "second home" at the Ronald McDonald House in Cologne is one of 19 such facilities in Germany that offer families with sick children on-site accommodation at the hospitals where their children are being treated. Each of the 19 houses has its own character: Cologne's looks like a fortress, nicknamed the "castle of protection."

Goodwill meets good design

Manfred Welzel, right, chairman of the Children's Aid Foundation, visits the Hamburg exhibition

Families like the Fornoffs are precisely who the Kinderhilfe Stiftung, McDonald's Children's Aid Foundation, had in mind when it teamed up with AIT ArchitekturSalon in Hamburg. The goal was to design a Ronald McDonald House for the Hamburg district of Altona with an emphasis on how aesthetics foster healing.

"As we know from various projects in the healthcare sector, it is specifically the feeling of well-being and a pleasant atmosphere that have an influence on the healing process and the mental state of patients," said Thomas Willemeit of German architecture firm GRAFT, which helped organize the call for blueprints. "Especially in medical care, the atmospheric quality is usually underrated."

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Ronald McDonald House garners star architects, criticism