Description

By arranging the same-handed rooms at a slight angle, each room benefits from a southerly orientation. The resulting triangular indentations in the façade become balconies and a twist in the room plan allows for moving the bed into a second position. The project shows how small deviations from conventional floor plans can create new possibilities and improve the quality of the patient’s stay.

The design of the new rehabilitation centre and ward building at Uster Hospital draws on the typology of the historical sanatorium buildings from the 1930s and takes it a step further to develop its own solution for the new extension. By turning the rooms slightly out of the axis of the new building, they pick up the orientation of the existing building and divide the large building mass into individually articulated units – the architects’ answer to expressing the aspect of human scale in a large clinic building. The façade is therefore an expression of the underlying design idea.

All the rooms face south and have floor-to-ceiling glazing providing generous views of the surrounding park and mountainous landscape and ensuring optimal illumination with natural light. Each room is fronted by a walk-on balcony, with slats screening patients in neighbouring rooms from prying eyes. The horizontal screen in front of the balcony provides shade, obstructs the direct view downwards and focusses attention on the snow-capped mountains beyond.

The patient rooms are barrier-free and wheelchair-accessible in all areas, not just in the bathrooms but also in the common zones, and a floor-flush threshold provides direct access to the wood-covered balcony via a sliding glazed door.

The position of the beds can be varied so that both beds can be placed lengthwise along the wall without any restrictions. Their diagonal placement eliminates the disadvantage of the rear bed, allowing the patient almost the same view as from the front bed, even when the privacy curtain between the beds is drawn. The patients’ common area with table and chairs fits perfectly into the bay window of the façade with its panoramic glazing.

The wall dividing the room from the bathroom is a custom-made fitting that includes a barrier-free shower, toilet and washbasin and has multifunctional niches and cupboards that can be used from either side of the wall by the patients and nursing staff. The wooden headboard wall behind the patient beds incorporates and conceals the medical fittings and lighting in order to emphasise the atmospheric qualities of the room as a living area over its medical function.

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Originally published in: Wolfgang Sunder, Julia Moellmann, Oliver Zeise, Lukas Adrian Jurk, The Patient Room, Birkhäuser, 2020.