Description

At the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Rue du Cherche-Midi, Jean Nouvel and Bernard Valero designed a state-of-the-art genetic imaging center. Genetic disorders account for 5,000 severe diseases; in Europe alone, they affect 35 million people. Joining forces with private companies and charitable foundations, the state, the city, a university and a hospital teamed up to create this institute. As is often the case with highly specialized facilities offering services for a cross section of patients, the institute is built in close proximity to a hospital, in this case the Hôpital Necker-Enfants Malades. Institut Imagine itself is dedicated to research; patients do not stay there overnight. The children, often accompanied by their parents, enter the building from the side of the hospital and find the clinics on the ground floor. The institute’s research laboratories facilitate close translational cooperation of some 400 experts of different fields who have several technology centers at their disposal for all forms of genetic analysis, cell and molecular imaging, gene transfer procedures as well as a DNA data center. On the first floor, a conference center has been included with an auditorium that seats 250 people. The clinic includes consultancy rooms, facilities for clinical research, a center for biological resources and 11 specialized units for rare diseases. Views on the interior garden establish visual contact between the researchers and the children visiting the clinic. Social spaces, often in patios, stimulate interaction between them, the clinicians and the patients – the institute’s so-called ‘golden triangle’.

The design of Institut Imagine presents a contemporary reinterpretation of some of the qualities of historic Parisian hospital architecture, especially the availability of ample greenery and the transparency of earlier hospital sites that allow for strolling around. Institut Imagine wants to be transparent, offering views across the site and inviting patients and parents to enjoy the building’s public spaces, notably the six story high grand hall carved with a light-flooded interior garden that is connected to the lobby on the side of Boulevard Montparnasse.

Synergy is a key strategy in tracing the origin of genetic diseases, the institute’s core business. Research directly informs treatment strategies, which in turn generate questions that trigger further investigation. Architecture can stimulate this way of working by creating spaces for the casual encounters of scientists and clinicians, informal meetings having been identified as particularly useful. The research departments have been integrated in care clusters that target specific medical conditions, preventing their division in separate wings far away from the patients.

Dedicated to medical imaging, the building expresses its function in the graphic treatment of the façades, where a repetition of characteristic DNA samples has been applied to the glass panels. Aspiring to make what the architect called ‘high-precision light architecture’, the center perfectly symbolizes its function.

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