Anders Bekeken

The Way We Heal Today: Mercea Merwede Health Centre by Rolf Reichardt

This design for a health centre takes account of the growing demand for health care, in a form that clusters it round the patient’s needs. Putting the patient at the centre calls for a fundamental rethink of the health care landscape.

The rapidly swelling group of 50 to 75 year olds in particular could do with a new approach to health care, not least as this age group is increasingly having to face symptoms of old age, often expressed in multiple disorders.

This project seeks a more patient-targeted health care and greater patient independence by combining specialisms in a multidisciplinary outpatients’ department. It also assesses which activities can best supplement the outpatient programme and to what extent these can have a commercial aspect so as to make them more relevant for the community as a whole. The scenario as developed unfurls a complete health care package from prevention to revalidation, with facilities relating to exercise, welfare and the dissemination of knowledge.

The design constructs for patients and staff an environment of active health care, one that invites them to be independent and more enterprising, instead of a passive hospital situation. The key to the scheme is an organizing principle that stages different routes along gradual transitions from public health and welfare spaces to screened-off treatment rooms. Instead of moving directly from treatment room to public space, patients follow a route that leads them past other health care activities they may be induced to take part in.

The routes through the building are organized in terms of exposure and enclosure. On the one hand, there are the familiar spaces of the outpatient programme and on the other, public spaces that include the knowledge centre, shops and a restaurant. In-between these are spaces for exercise and welfare. Rooms for medical treatment and commercial spaces are placed at a respectable distance, with the exercise and welfare rooms gluing it all together. Spaces are structured and programmatically interlocked at various angles and heights by a strategy of folding, incising, meshing and reversing. In this landscape, floor levels are gently raked and the public space gradually compacts the more private its use becomes.

Two long concrete basements, one for cycle storage, the other a car parking deck, protrude slightly above the ground plane so that daylight enters along the sides. A frame of steel trusses, unconnected to the ground plane, rests on the basements. The frame is a follow-through of the conceptual departure-point of folding, incising, meshing and reversing and is expressed as a space-defining hybrid structure of floors, walls, stairs and roofs. Moving through the building, the slabs’ appearance shifts gradually from narrow to wide so that the views through widen and compact. In the rooms not lying along the facades, the roof panels slide back so that daylight washes in along both sides of the inner walls. Glass partitions have graduated green tints that become more intense as the privacy beyond them increases. Their degree of opacity intensifies accordingly, from clear glass to so dense for the operating theatres that only moving silhouettes can be observed from outside. Source: Archiprix

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