‘Circle says it was not about lowest cost if that didn’t deliver the value it sought, which included quality and aesthetics’
The procurement was design and build with client, designers and constructors formed as a team before construction began. The approach is one of analysis and standardisation. These dry facts are germane to understanding this scheme and could be seen as a pointer for conceiving our future healthcare buildings. The government has advocated a similar approach for its own schemes. Circle formed a highly co-ordinated team using parametric modelling and design for manufacture and assembly, and remained at its heart, seeking to realise the value it had identified. It was of course about cost, but also client involvement and leadership. Circle says it was not about lowest cost if that didn’t deliver the value it sought, which included quality and aesthetics. The resulting building with acute hospital facilities was delivered at the sort of square metre cost of the better NHS LIFT schemes for less complex primary care buildings.
The plot straddles the boundary within a new development where residences give way to commercial buildings, so lacks a defined back and front. The architectural response is pragmatic, with a brick block facing the housing and a more extrovert and glossy glass enclosure facing the commercial zone. This won’t make purists happy, nor will the fact that none of it overtly reveals its healthcare use. Cost concerns did trim aspirations in some detailed aspects, most notably where a run of utility and plant spaces are carefully placed to both define the main entrance forecourt and parking and hide the service yard beyond. This element was conceived as a west facing planted wall and was to carry the outside into the building down the central space that runs right through its centre. An optimist might hope the client will someday return to that idea and execute it in celebration of the building’s other successes, as it is presently a rather forbidding bald streak of brickwork. The restrained palette of colours and materials lends it a subtle quality. Tilted glass panels in a giant basket weave pattern mark out the perimeter of the inpatient wards and articulate windowless facades to imply hidden windows rather than none.
Main atrium with café.
Main atrium with café. · Credit: Jocelyn Low
The interior is where the analytical approach has yielded most reward. The building is planned from inside, restrained by the site and ordered by an applied system of structure around a building services diagram. Intelligent organisation of the engineering infrastructure has liberated the interior from relentless suspended ceilings, and spaces that benefit from natural light have been provided with lots of it, including operating theatres. Precast concrete floors are exposed as ceiling soffits which, without extensive horizontal transfer of services, give bedrooms recognisably domestic height. Soft furnishings are used to absorb sound, avoiding the hollow echoing sometimes experienced in similar arrangements. Planning is tight and efficient save for the corridor spaces – driven around the perimeter of the wards by the decision to face the bedrooms inward. This slight deviation from the floor space efficiency mantra does provide fully glazed links at the northern end of the building however, and has an attractive unintended consequence of varying the spaces further.
With only single rooms and bays and no shared spaces, each in-patient ward has 15 bedrooms which look into private landscaped courtyards rather than the somewhat uninspiring neighbourhood. The architect felt winter colour might be added to the planting, but I found the subtle play of grasses and coarse gritty soils against the backdrop of timber shingle clad facades calming and reminiscent of the seaside. The privacy and a disconnecting sense of being elsewhere was somehow reassuring – unexpected poetry among the technical literature.