‘Just like the Guggenheim!’ Inside Zurich’s stunning, revolutionary new children’s hospital

‘Hhospitals are the ugliest places in the world,” says Jacques Herzog. “They are a product of blind functionality thinking while neglecting basic human needs.” The Swiss architect has a point. With their low ceilings, windowless hallways, and bright fluorescent lights, hospitals sometimes seem deliberately set up to make you feel sick, if you don’t already. Attempts to brighten them up with colored cladding panels and art commissions do little to distract from the bleak reality of buildings where the human experience – for patients, doctors and visitors alike – is often an afterthought.

Herzog insists it doesn’t have to be this way. And he has proof. He stands in the circular courtyard of his practice’s stunning response to the grim healthcare buildings of the last century. It’s a tranquil space reminiscent of a sylvan spa complex, surrounded by sculpted wooden slats and planted with tall trees and ferns, where light reflects off marble sculptures glistening in the drizzle. A wide gallery deck surrounds the floor above, with a touch of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, where bedrooms open onto wide, daylit corridors. Entering through revolving pink glass doors, you’ll find a concrete staircase that spirals down into the foyer, curling around a core of colorful neon tubes that seem ready to beam you upward.

Welcome to Zurich’s remarkable new children’s hospital, the Children’s Hospital – or ‘Kispi’ for short – a 14-year effort to revolutionize the way we think about the architecture of healing. It’s not trying to be a fancy hotel like some private hospitals with their plush carpets and room service. It is simply a place where simple things, such as the quality of light and views, the scale and proportion of the spaces and the texture of the materials, have been carefully considered and honed to make the experience as pleasant as possible for everyone. to make. Why would this be so unusual?

Herzog & de Meuron may not sound like an obvious choice to design a hospital. Over the years, the architects have built a reputation as consummate creators of cultural beacons, creating enchanting museums, concert halls and stadiums around the world that revel in their structural and material alchemy. But beyond these glitzy committees, the 600-strong practice has quietly been working on the subject of healthcare for the past two decades. The company completed an impressive, yet strangely undersung, rehabilitation clinic in Basel in 2002, and is now building a huge amoeba-shaped hospital in Denmark as well as a terracotta-clad ziggurat teaching hospital in San Francisco. “It’s an incredibly neglected area,” says Herzog. “But I am absolutely convinced that architecture can contribute to the healing process.”

A walk through Kispi suggests he may be right. From the moment you encounter the cartoonishly large gates, spread open like the entrance to a gigantic salon, leading into the 16 planted courtyards spread throughout the building, it is unlike any other hospital. Spread over three floors of 200 meters long and 60 meters wide, the enormous building is conceived as a city, with several departmental neighborhoods on either side of a winding main street that widens and narrows and merges into side streets and squares. Instead of the usual identical wards, the 200 patient rooms are imagined as individual ‘cottages’, arranged like small wooden huts around the perimeter of the top floor, with sloping roofs that tilt in different directions.

“We wanted to avoid feeling like you were just one unit in a row of stacked boxes,” says project leader Mark Bähr. “Having a sloping wooden roof and natural light makes a huge psychological difference when you lie in bed all day staring at the ceiling.” The rooms have a more homely feel than typical hospital rooms, as if they were in the attic of a mountain chalet. They have large windows and smart window seats that pull out into beds, giving tired parents a place to sleep. Fun child-height portlights can be opened for natural ventilation, while each room has its own bathroom – a welcome change from the previous hospital’s facilities, where 17 parents shared a shower. Wooden floors give a feeling of warmth, unlike the usual sleek vinyl – and they are just as hygienic, coated with ultra-hard-wearing polyurethane.

From the outside, the low-lying complex is designed to look approachable and uninstitutional, with the long facade gently curving inward to embrace the street. The friendly feeling is emphasized by the rooflines of the bedrooms, which tilt back and forth like a cheerful row of treehouses, atop the concrete frame. The architects had originally proposed an all-wood building, but the client wanted something that felt more substantial, and they made the most of the compromise. The frame is treated as a large fixture, within which the lighter partitions can be moved, should the hospital need to be reconfigured. “We have already designed options for future expansion,” says Bähr, including the possibility of an additional floor on the roof, while the offices are future-proofed with facilities that can become medical spaces if necessary.

There are kid-friendly touches everywhere, from a low reception desk so kids can see over it when they arrive, to cushion-filled booths and hallways wide enough for ping pong and football. In a very un-Swiss-minimalist way, the walls are even coated to encourage scribbling. “We tried to make the architecture appeal to children’s curiosity,” says Christine Binswanger, partner in charge of the project who also led the design of The Basel rehabilitation clinic – a half-timbered house with a courtyard, which set the example for Kispi. “Normally they expect you to paint animals on the walls, but we did things like placing the wooden columns on small round pieces of stone, or making a hole in the elevator so you can look down the shaft.” The upcoming play areas will take the fun a few steps further.

To navigate the previous hospital you had to be accompanied by a guide, but here finding your way is facilitated with simple movements. Extensive amounts of glass make it easy to identify staff, while the corridors end in large windows overlooking the trees, rather than ending in empty cul-de-sacs. The bedrooms are staggered in a gentle motion, avoiding unforgiving hotel-like rows of anonymous doors, while the two characterful staircases help find the way back to the entrance.

With more than 2,300 rooms, the attention to detail is astonishing (a decade-long process brought to life in the company’s recent Royal Academy exhibition). The architects designed 700 different built-in pieces of furniture, including fold-down tables in treatment rooms, so parents can sit and talk to the doctors, and tables in waiting areas, tied to the pentagonal concrete columns – even the profile of the structural frame is shaped to add interest . Just when you think you’ve seen it all, a glowing door leads inside a James Turrell celestial spacean oval chapel-like room where patients can bathe under an ever-changing rainbow of therapeutic light.

The Kinderspital is managed by the Eleonore Foundation, a charity founded in 1868. It is known for its specialties in oncology, cardiology, neonatology and burns – fields whose boundaries are being pushed in a special research tower across the street, also designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The research labs are foiled against the hospital’s low-lying carpet and housed in a bright white cylinder, like a stack of polo coins, where workspaces open onto a bright atrium reminiscent of New York’s. Guggenheim Museum. Three lecture halls on the ground floor are intelligently designed with sliding wooden walls, which can retract so that the entire space becomes one circular agora, while a pair of corkscrew stairs bring some of the architects’ signature theater pieces to the proceedings.

It would be easy to assume that this dazzling media utopia is the product of Swiss exceptionalism, which is only possible in such a small, rich and well-financed country. But that’s not entirely true. The hospital alone cost £517 million (or £6,500 per square meter) to build, coming from a combination of private donors and public funds. It’s difficult to make a direct comparison, but two recent British hospitals – the Royal Liverpool and the Midland Metropolitan in Smethwick – are each costs a minimum of £7,770 per square metrealthough they contain three times as many beds. Both were years late and cost hundreds of millions more than planned, and both were the result of failed £1 billion PFI (private finance initiative) contracts with doomed contractor Carillion. Both have faced a litany of problems.

Thoughtful, human design doesn’t have to cost more. From rigorous procurement to well-trained construction staff to understanding the benefits that architecture can deliver, Kispi’s story offers powerful lessons that Britain’s ill-fated hospital construction program could do well to learn from. Wes Streeting should visit.