Following an international design competition, we are thrilled to announce we have been selected for the planning and design of a new hospital in Zhuhai, located in China’s southern Guangdong province.
The new Hengqin Hospital will be one of the jewels of the new Hengqin district; its architecture will embody the importance of the institution, its mission and its significance to the city, the region and the country. The new hospital building reflects an ambitious vision: rooted in local wisdom and culture, but also looking boldly into the future. The planning and design of the building has been driven by five principles: a healing campus, embedded nature, an integrated building, patient centered design and a high-performing building.
The Hengqin Hospital will be the anchor – and the signature component – of the two-block medical campus. Instead of organizing the hospital as a series of independent pieces distributed across the block around a central open space, the hospital is conceived as a single structure, integrated and contiguous for maximum efficiency. This allows the hospital to open itself up to the rest of the block, creating a shared garden zone between the main hospital and the surrounding specialty hospitals.
Nature is the driver for the design of the Hengqin Hospital. The building is embedded in nature. This takes many forms including a waterway that is threaded around a connected network of outdoor spaces, parks, promenades and gardens that become a signature feature of this hospital complex, and a key amenity for the campus community.
The hospital building is placed along the city streets, but it is open toward the heart of the block, where it breaks down its scale and changes character as it embraces a series of outdoor spaces that become the heart of the campus. This interior garden – a precious place of nature, water and peace – is revealed as one enters the hospital and becomes a focal visual and experiential point for all occupants of all buildings on campus.
Total No. of Beds: 500 (with the possibility of being expanded to 1,000)
Total Sq. Meters: 130,000
This Earth Week, we’ll be covering five landmark buildings exemplifying new approaches to building performance and sustainability.
The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Klarman Building is the first hospital in the northeast to implement chilled beams in an inpatient setting. Early energy analysis demonstrated that the use of chilled beams would be the best way to reduce building energy use.
For this strategy to work, however, the peak thermal loads of the façades could not exceed the capacity of the chilled beams. An integrated design approach and in-house modeling allowed for constant tuning of the façade to optimize glazing, solar exposure and massing. The building orients glazing to face true north and south to minimize heat gain and maximize occupant comfort, resulting in a 15% reduction in peak solar load.
Beyond performance, the distinctive serrated terracotta façade reflects the scale and cadence of individual patient rooms, providing a delicate scale and texture to the façade.
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