Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBS) has been awarded first prize in a competition to design a new facility hub and two laboratory buildings at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Biological Sciences. The commission, FCBS’ first in Scotland, will also include the modernization of an existing 10-story laboratory tower which was built in the 1960s at the University’s Kings Building Campus.
Danish firm C.F. Møller has won first place in a competition to design an extension and renovation of Vendsyssel Hospital in Hjørring, Denmark. This winning proposal will add 14,000 square meters to the existing structure, incorporating a new treatment center, a ward for mothers and children, and a rooftop children’s playground. The new facilities are arranged around large courtyards, and make use of large windows to display the path of travel through the hospital. This helps make navigating through the large building as easy as possible.
Maggie's Centres are the legacy of Margaret Keswick Jencks, a terminally ill woman who had the notion that cancer treatment environments and their results could be drastically improved through good design. Her vision was realized and continues to be realized today by numerous architects, including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Snøhetta - just to name a few. Originally appearing in Metropolis Magazine as “Living with Cancer,” this article by Samuel Medina features images of Maggie's Centres around the world, taking a closer look at the organization's roots and its continued success through the aid of architects.
It was May 1993, and writer and designer Margaret Keswick Jencks sat in a windowless corridor of a small Scottish hospital, dreading what would come next. The prognosis was bad—her cancer had returned—but the waiting, and the waiting room, were draining. Over the next two years until her death, she returned several times for chemo drips. In such neglected, thoughtless spaces, she wrote, patients like herself were left to “wilt” under the desiccating glare of fluorescent lights.
Wouldn’t it be better to have a private, light-filled space in which to await the results of the next bout of tests, or from which to contemplate, in silence, the findings? If architecture could demoralize patients—could “contribute to extreme and mental enervation,” as Keswick Jencks observed—could it not also prove restorative?
Responding to the demand for healthcare services in rural Southeast Asia, Building Trust International launched an international competition - Moved to Care - to envision flexible and relocatable healthcare facilities. Over 200 entrants participated; one professional winner, a multi-disciplinary team from the USA, and one student winner were honored. Check out their winning proposals, after the break...
Herzog & de Meuron and Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects have been announced as winners of an international competition to design one of Denmark’s largest hospitals: Nyt Hospital Nordsjælland. Selected ahead of six other practices, including BIG and C.F. Møller, Herzog & de Meuron’s nature-inspired proposal will provide the New North Zealand Hospital with a 124,000 square meter facility that serves 24 medical departments and provides over 660 beds.
“The hospital organically reaches out into the wide landscape. Simultaneously its soft, flowing form binds the many components of the hospital,” described the architects. “It is a low building that fosters exchange between staff and patients, and it has a human scale despite its very large size.”
The Spanish office of Francisco Mangado in collaboration with French offices V2S architectes, Terrell, SACET, Alayrac, and GAMBA Acoustique Architecturale & Urbaine, has won an international competition to convert the old Thermal Hospital of the municipality of Amélie-les-Bains in southern France into a spa.
Architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp), with partners JB Ferrari, have won first prize in an international competition to design a new children’s emergency unit at the Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland. The 85-bed hospital will feature a terraced inner courtyard with conservatory, which will serve as a protected outside play area, that offers ample natural light and space for plant-life.
This article, written by Kim A. O'Connell, and first published on the AIA website as "Is there a Doctor in the Firm? (Or a Nurse in the Studio?)" discusses the growing overlap between architects and healthcare professionals, who collaborate or even learn both disciplines to design more effective healthcare architecture - relying on research more rigorously than ever before.
Since it opened last fall, a cardiac hospital in Bulgaria is already operating at full capacity and is among the most technologically advanced of its kind in Europe. Project delivery for the City Clinic in Sofia was remarkably fast—only a year from the time Dallas-based HKS Architects was hired until doctors began seeing patients. A former car dealership was renovated to create the 38,000-square-foot, 55-bed facility, helping to expedite matters.
The other major contributing factor may have been that, from its earliest beginnings, a physician played a leading role—from landing the project to identifying specific medical needs and seeing the design through to completion. It's a model that seems to be taking hold in architecture. More and more, architecture firms are bringing health professionals into their design studios to help them create the next generation of healthcare architecture.
Read on after the break to find out how this shift is producing better buildings for healthcare
.jpg?1397700541 "Fife, Scotland, 2006 by Zaha Hadid Architects / © Werner Huthmacher. ImageAll sharp angles and painted a sinister black, Zaha Hadid's Fife center isn't the first thing you'd expect from a Maggie's Centre. The exterior invited comparisons to a bunker, despite the airy, humane spaces within. \"Zaha got a lot of criticism and her building is bloody good,\" Jencks says of his former student's design. The building was the architect's first in the UK.")
