Cancer Centre at Guy’s

Cor Wagenaar, Noor Mens

Description

The cancer treatment center concentrates most of the oncological departments formerly dispersed across 13 buildings on the two sites of the Guy’s & St. Thomas’ Hospital. The designers and Stantec – the healthcare specialists – developed a masterplan for these fragmented departments which facilitates multidisciplinary and translational ways of working. The site, a small, triangular plot, left the architects no other option but to design a tower, a building of 14 floors. In its densely built-up inner city setting, the center mediates between Renzo Piano’s 300 m tall Shard, the medium-height tower wing of Guy’s and the lower urban fabric south of it. The building combines four stacked villages of two or three floors: a welcoming entrance cluster, radiotherapy (the first such department in Europe to be located above ground), an outpatient cluster and a department for chemotherapy. The northside of the tower concentrates the science and treatment zone with an emphasis on clinical procedures and technology; the southside is reserved for therapies with a social and interactive nature.

The entrance hall of the building, a double-height, glazed lobby acts as a transition zone between the urbanity outside and the urbane atmosphere within. It is designed as a new gateway to the hospital campus, accommodating a mix of different users and passersby. Patients and visitors arriving at the ‘Welcome Village’ may use the educational and complimentary therapy activities offered there or access the other three villages which represent stages in the cancer patient journey: radiotherapy, outpatients and chemotherapy. Each village has two or three floors and the outpatients’ department has facilities for imaging diagnostics and minor medical procedures to minimize patient travelling. Upon leaving the lift, patients enter a square with an external, planted balcony attached to it. The villages have smaller squares intended to foster interaction between patients and caregivers, researchers and clinicians. These have been designed in a homely, domestic idiom, offering respite from the inevitably clinical atmosphere in the rest of the departments. The building incorporates work by five world-class artists: Daniel Silver, Gitta Gschwendtner, Angela Bulloch, Karel Martens and Mariele Neudecker. Designer Ivan Harbour sees improving people’s lives as a responsibility for architects, and architecture as an effective tool to do so. Therefore, providing patient-centered care in a building with a human scale was one of the principal goals.