Description

With only 28 beds for non-emergency medical treatment, Circle Bath is a very small facility. Its initiator, the private health provider Circle, strives to usher in a revolution in healthcare. Anticipating an influx of patients from the National Health Service, the investment should partly be recouped from public money. This requires the provider to offer medical services that meet the standards of the public system at similar costs. Prospective patients, therefore, should prefer Circle Bath to the usual large-scale medical facilities run by the state. Besides the level of the medical processes it offers, architectural features that one would expect in a five-star boutique hotel rather than in a hospital are the most striking qualities of Circle Bath.

Situated 9 km outside the center of Bath, the hospital overlooks an industrial site and green Somerset landscape. Like a hotel, it attracts users from the wider region, not only from the immediate vicinity. Its architectural features make quite clear that the building has nothing in common with the nearby industrial boxes, its most striking aspect being the oblong, stretched-out first floor, an aluminium-clad box on top of a recessed ground floor with large glass walls alternating with parts covered in black panels: the box appears to float above the landscape. Underneath, the hidden third floor accommodates the ‘hot floor’, the most salient part of which is an operating theater with a glass wall facing a small garden. The atmosphere generated by high-tech medical equipment designates the basement as the part that most resembles a classical hospital. The consultancy rooms and the outpatient department are located on the ground floor, facing south. Here, generic spaces prevail: special equipment needed for specific medical procedures is not fixed to the room, but mounted on wheels. The absence of designated rooms guarantees maximum flexibility. The shiny box on top contains the patient wards: 28 single rooms with an en-suite bathroom, a covered balcony set back within the box that allowed the architects to provide all patient rooms with a small herb garden. Set against the interior wall, a chair for visitors occupies a place that can easily accommodate a bed, in case visitors wish to spend the night in the hospital.

There is a physiotherapy suite and nine outpatient consultation rooms. Patient rooms are furnished to a high standard, with an en-suite walk-in shower room, pull-out guest bed and a warm color palette of ochre and rust. Natural light is maximized and natural materials were used wherever possible. The four operating theaters are fitted with the latest technology and, unusually, admit daylight. The logistics layout matches the hospital’s functional zoning in its clarity and simplicity: the entrance leads straight to a covered central court that provides visual connections from all parts of the building. This makes the use of way-finding and signage systems superfluous and prevents the need for long corridors. Enhanced by its small scale, Circle Bath’s clear layout, simple logistics and hotel-like atmosphere should point toward a future dominated by similar high-quality mini-hospitals which in the long run may establish themselves as nodes in new healthcare networks.

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