RIBA International Awards for Excellence 2021

HEALTH IS AN IDEAL STATE, BUT ALSO IS A PRESCRIPTED STATE AND AN IDEOLOGICAL POSITION

The building looks to recuperate the image of the Foundation as a green and open space. An image which is open to the city frees open space to generate a place of healthcare. This processes involve elements that go beyond architecture, the idea is to reduce the stress using colors and natural components. We propose the recovery of patios and natural light in each of the spaces, conditions that are vital for the patient’s recovery.

The project proposes the reforestation of plants that attract animals (butterflies, birds) and create a protection barrier. We use the existing vegetation and we complement it that will help to minimize dust particles, wind, odors and noise.

Santa Fe Bogota, Colombia’s capital is a city of brick. This major extension to the private city hospital is a study in brick and an examination of the material and its application in the creation of health-giving environments. Given its proximity to the city and a major highway, plus its function, this is a necessarily sealed box of glass and concrete. But over that, the architects have thrown a perforate veil of brick that matches the brick of the original hospital and provides a second skin that admits air where widows can be opened. This system of slender bricks was clipped to steel cables creating a masonry veil that stretches across the vast majority of the façade, opening the hospital to the city and filling it with natural light.

El Equipo Mazzanti’s proposal was that “space is a stimulus that affects human behaviour and that architecture is an opportunity to foster new relationships.” To that end the new building forms a public front door to the whole hospital. Despite being a private institution (more than half the country’s hospitals are private) the new building offers citizens a route connecting two important avenues along a path that ends in a public plaza with restaurants and the possibility of art installations and musical performances.

Naturally this openness extends to patients and their care. An internal tropical garden on the ninth floor gives patients a space full of light, plants, and birds that takes them out of the hospital context and allows them to relate to the world outside. This is not only a place for relaxation, post-occupancy studies show that it forms an important part of the healing process with a reduction in the number of medical complications and the average time spent by patients cut from three days to two.

The firm’s ‘mission statement’ is that: “architecture value not only lies in itself but in what it produces. We see architecture not only as a profession but a way to build thinking and locate in the world. For us there is no difference between thinking and making; the hand and the mind are the same action and a set that are the base for our practice.” This major hospital addition brilliantly fulfils that aspiration and is a template for future hospitals across the world.