Thursday, 11 November 2010

CircleBath Hospital won the award for Best Hospital Design at the Building Better Healthcare Awards last night.

The challenge was to create a ‘compact’ facility which placed the patient experience at the very centre of the design. The Client, namely Circle / Healthcare Properties Management, wanted entirely new approach with none of the burdens of familiar healthcare facilities.

Foster + Partners was appointed as the architect, for whom this would be their first hospital project. The result is a hospital that at first glance seems more like a five-star hotel. Split into three zones planned around a central light-filled atrium, the bedrooms are contained within a sleek marine aluminium shingle box that hovers over the darker ground floor. Windows to the south open onto a patient terrace.

Sarah Simpkin of architects, Foster + Partners said, ‘The fabric of the building is self-consciously simple, rational and symmetrical and there are no awkward, indulgent projections’.

Buro Four was the project manager.