This thesis rethinks the hospital not as a stable institutional space or inert container of care, but as a socio-material and spatio-temporal assemblage that moves, holds, and endures through use. Taking up Gieryn’s (2002) provocation to ask what buildings do, it approaches York Hospital as an active participant in care rather than its backdrop, tracing how space articulates and propagates institutional effects into bodies, schedules, atmospheres, and everyday life beyond the hospital walls. Methodologically, the study adopts a radical empiricism that reads archival records of spatial becoming alongside interviews with staff and patients. Plans, minutes, drawings, and photographs are treated not as representations but as operative devices that format conduct in advance, while interview accounts enact lived realities of navigation, delay, repair, and coping. Read together, these partial traces open the black box of space and render institutional movement visible as uneven, layered, and multi-temporal. Conceptually, the thesis works with assemblage thinking inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), understood not as a portable theory but as a disposition for keeping space, material, people, governance, and time on the same plane. Rather than treating change as rupture or endurance as stasis, the analysis follows three interwoven operations ((re)composition, change, and endurance) that cut across the empirical material as diagnostic lines. From this movement emerge four analytic lines grounded in the site itself: a Returning Line, where architectural diagrams absorb pressure through indeterminacy; a Capture Line, where efficiency stabilises as a fragile circuit; a Wrinkled Line, where openness and intimacy are governed through folding; and Con-Tension, which names endurance achieved through the active management of irresolution at institutional edges. Rather than closing York Hospital as a finished case, the thesis releases these lines as analytic starting points. In doing so, it offers a vocabulary for understanding how large institutional spaces hold together without standing still, and how endurance is produced not through stability, but through continuous adjustment, repair, improvisation, and delay.
