When I was a child, I hated hospitals. The sight of white walls and people in white coats frightened me and made me run away from them along long hospital corridors. And I was a sickly child … 20 years have passed and even now going to the hospital costs a lot of nerves and efforts. This is how the place affects a person, and children feel it especially keenly.
The architecture of children's hospitals is a special kind of architecture. He must take into account the psychology of the child, and children perceive everything more sharply - they are more impressionable than adults. In the Soviet Union, children's clinics were decorated with colorful mosaics and paintings on the theme of a happy childhood for Octobrists and pioneers, which undoubtedly took into account child psychology, but in an ideological vein. In our time, when Spider-Man and Jack Sparrow have become the idols of children, the "happy childhood of the pioneers" is hardly understandable to a modern child. So the question arises: what should be the modern architecture of children's hospitals?
A variant of the answer to this question was developed for several years in the architectural workshop of A. Asadov. Last year the project was approved and construction began. This is a large complex of the Center for Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology at the intersection of Leninsky Prospekt and Miklukho-Maklaya Street.
The center consists of several medical buildings, a polyclinic and a hotel block for recovering children. Their composition is built according to a rather traditional scheme, reminiscent of a staircase with two rungs. Two long buildings are connected by two short ones, forming one closed courtyard in the middle and two open ones at the edges. I must say that this scheme was invented and tested by the avant-garde of the 1920s for large residential and public buildings, and since then it has been quite widespread, including in schools and hospitals. However, in the northwestern part, the scheme loses its usual rigidity - the hulls open, the crossbar loses its straightness, and the volumes begin to stick to each other in a completely different way, smartly, asymmetrically, the colors reach their apogee, and the hypertrophied long "legs" complete the effect of the fairytale "town". This town is a hotel for recovering children, named by the authors "The Tree of Life".
It is necessary to say separately about the different colors. This is one of the main architectural techniques, one might even say that it contains the soul of this medical complex, painted with "pink paints" almost like a 17th century ornamental temple. The bay windows of the straight medical buildings are multi-colored - perhaps later it will be possible to name them by their colors: “green”, “violet”, “orange”. The interiors are multi-colored - somewhere there are walls, somewhere there are columns. All colors are bright, open, iridescent.
What, probably, is the secret of this architecture, or rather the meaning put into it by the authors of the building. The colors of the rainbow, being broken into fragments, gather in one place like a bouquet and return wholeness to the rainbow, as if they were standing anew. The color is followed by the form - it also gathers in a bundle, loses its severity - as if a rainbow, focusing in one place, transforms the building.
It should be remembered here that the rainbow is a symbol of hope. So it is not a color as such that permeates the building, but the hope for recovery - is collected on the "Tree of Life" and casts its reflections on other buildings, encouraging kids and their parents, giving support. More than a meaningful architectural solution - in fact, the authors tried with the help of art alone (!) To give people hope. Or even "spur" the process of recovery and the transition of children from the space of medical "beams" to a "living town".
Of course, this is not the first building for children built with colors. The "colorful" theme is popular in foreign architecture for children - for example, you can remember Japanese kindergartens made of plastic containers and much more. Cheerful colors are pleasing to children and adults, they can create a friendly atmosphere and make life less dull. We have such experiences, too, not new - the boarding school for autistic children of Andrei Chernikhov has long become a classic. Not so long ago, the boarding school in Kozhukhovo, built by the Atrium bureau, collected all possible awards. It is not the first time that Asadov's workshop turns to the theme of color, which is quite logical for children. We have already written about one project - in Mytishchi. However, the "Center for Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology" occupies an unusual place in this row - from the architectural point of view. Because in the rainbow colors there is a meaning embedded here, obviously superior to “just” a good mood. Here the architects seemed to have tried - in their own way - to pray for the recovery of the children.
