Description

The principal aim of the Cancer Counseling Center in Livsrum is to offer its visitors comfort, social support and relevant insight in the nature of the type of cancer they have to face and the therapies used to combat it. The program envisaged a library, a kitchen, private meeting rooms, a lounge, a workshop, a physical fitness area and a place for medical counseling. Instead of integrating all these functions in one single volume, EFFEKT designed seven buildings, all in the same, residential idiom. Three long-stretched volumes, like all the others covered with a gabled roof, demarcate two courtyards, each of which is closed with two similar but much shorter buildings. The height of the roofs differs, resulting in slopes of various grades. White is the buildings’ dominant color inside as well as outside. All façades facing outward are clad in white fiber-cement boards in horizontal stripes, the only exception being the entrance part, which is clad in narrow, vertical wooden panels. These are also used for all gables facing the interior courtyards, giving them a warm atmosphere. The entire roof is clad in the same white boards as the exterior façade; hiding the gutters and the rain pipes behind the cladding, the architects took care that nothing disturbs their simple geometry. White is also the dominant color in the buildings’ interior finishes, but the floors and window casings are made from solid bamboo.

The materials selected for the furniture include solid natural materials such as non-lacquered hard wood, leather and wool, which result in a modern and stylish yet comfortable, domestic interior. Part of the walls are entirely clad with wooden bookshelves that form a perfect square grid, with some of them painted white. Where they are lining outside walls pierced with windows, they are part of the window frame, suggesting that the walls are much thicker than they actually are. Located next to a hospital, this Counseling Center compliments the more invasive therapies provided there and provides a frame of reference for them to the patient.

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Originally published in: Cor Wagenaar, Noor Mens, Guru Manja, Colette Niemeijer, Tom Guthknecht, Hospitals: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2018.