The medical complex with a total area of 124,000 m2 will unite 24 departments and will be able to accommodate up to 660 patients at a time. It will be built in the city of Hillerød, which is part of Greater Copenhagen and best known for Frederiksborg Castle. Like the castle, the new hospital will be built among the many lakes that abound in this part of Denmark. Actually, it was the picturesque landscape that prompted the architects to the main idea of the project: in the interpretation of Herzog & de Meuron, the hospital is a system of low-rise buildings, organically integrated into the natural environment.
By opting for low-rise buildings, the architects were able to find a compromise between the extensive functional program of the new complex and the desire to give it a chamber scale, which, they are convinced, has a much more healing power than traditional multi-storey hospitals. Having given the buildings a semicircular shape in the plan, the architects are assembling a giant four-leafed leaf on the territory allocated for the construction of the hospital. Inside it, a system of landscaped courtyards flowing into each other and galleries-passages partially buried in the ground are being created, the roofs of which are landscaped. The center of this composition will be the volume of the central hall, from which you can get into four round courtyards - a kind of ceremonial public spaces intended both for patients and doctors of the complex, as well as for visitors, as well as outpatients.
“We are delighted to win this competition as choosing a project like ours promises to open a new page in the interaction between architecture and healthcare,” Herzog & de Meuron said in a press release.
It is worth noting that Herzog & de Meuron's rivals in their projects also focused on the relationship of the new hospital with the surrounding landscape and the relatively low height of the buildings.
The Danish bureau BIG interpreted the medical facility as a system of closed rings, each of which is formed by buildings with a height of 2-4 floors. Their roofs were supposed to be fully exploitable, thereby integrating the hospital into the landscape as much as possible and giving the latter an additional “dimension”.
Another Danish bureau, C. F. Møller, at first, on the contrary, preferred a more traditional configuration for hospitals, having assembled several branched chains from rectangular volumes, in terms of which they clearly resemble Tetris figures. It was with such a project that the bureau reached the final of the competition, after which it developed a new version. In concept No. 2, the stake was made on softer plastic of buildings, and the greater spread in their number of storeys allowed the architects to assemble all the buildings into a single structure. On the main "twig", which has characteristic "natural" outlines in the plan, lower buildings are strung, the roofs of which are greened and turned into walking ramps, the continuation of which are footpaths that entwine the entire complex.
