SubscribeBuilding projects for children demand a high degree of empathy. This applies most particularly to hospitals. At the new Children's and Young People's Clinic in Singen, appealing architecture and a holistic design concept combine to create a health-boosting ambiance.
Your eye is immediately caught by the colourful fantasy figures signposting the way to the entrance. The ground floor of the new annex radiates cheerful, friendly transparency: you can see children playing in the garden floor below. The upper floors feature brick-red modelling plaster, while to the south the building is rounded off by generously dimensioned windows, loggias and the open escape stairs.
The appealing architecture is continued throughout the interior, and not until they arrive in the patients’ rooms do visitors actually come to realize they’re inside a hospital, the Hegau Clinic in Singen, Germany. The new Central Annex, planned by the architects Mangold and Thoma, has since January 2003 accommodated the Children’s Clinic, the accident surgery and urological department, and the Women’s Clinic.
To the north, a glass structural interface about 4 m wide forms the transition between the brick building erected in 1928 and the new four-storey building, which is approximately 40 m long. This accommodates the nursing bases, which constitute the organizational centre of each ward, and in their open, spacious design are reminiscent of a hotel’s foyer area.
The annex has been built as a composite-steel skeleton structure with solid ceilings on a reinforced-concrete foundation slab, and designed as a two-front configuration. The inside corridors provide access to the patients’ rooms, and end at the lounges on the 2nd to 4th floors. Here, at the southern end, the architects have on each floor included a green living room with a balcony – and glass walls all round for a view of the park.
Spacious two-bed rooms
The wards for adults each incorporate eight two-bed rooms and four single-bed rooms: all of them have their own bathroom. In the two-bed rooms, exceptionally spacious with a depth of 5.87 m, the beds are arranged opposite each other: this means that they are more or less equal in terms of window-proximity, while simultaneously providing a separate privacy zone for each patient. All beds have a telephone and a TV, plus a modem. A light paging system with intercom ensures direct communication with the nursing base, saving nurses and carers from unnecessary legwork.
In the wards for adults, the material and colours chosen for floors, furniture and curtains are discreet, but not sterile. The workplace for the nurses and carers in the room has also been integrated into this concept. One special feature incorporated in the Hegau Clinic is the cupboards for dressings and waste, designed on the service-hatch principle: from the room itself, nurses and patients can access the dressings and bandages, plus the waste bins, while from the corridor the dressing supplies are topped up and the waste bins emptied.
The architects paid particular attention to the interior configuration and design of the Children’s and Young People’s Clinic, which is accommodated on the ground floor and the garden floor. The task here was to meet the requirements of hospital work while at the same time allowing for the needs, fears and emotions of a sick child. “We were aiming to create an atmosphere for children and young people, which permits them to exercise their imagination despite being ill,” is how Ulrich Mangold explains the architectural concept involved.
Long corridor broken up by open spaces
The three-bed (young-people’s) room, the eight two-bed rooms and the four single-bed rooms have flexible furnishing options, and are so spacious that up to two mothers can stay the night there as well. In order to break up the long corridor, it has been widened by recessed doors to create open spaces. Milky-glass light fittings mounted under the ceilings support this purpose, creating a daylight feel. The white and blue lamps inside are computer-controlled, enabling different times of day to be simulated, like sunrise, midday sun (emergency lighting), sunset and night sky.
At the southern end of the corridor, a balloon gondola suspended from the ceiling floats in a two-storey air space. It serves parents and children as a visitors’ room and gallery lounge for visitors, and (as a proper gondola should) provides extensive views: of the ward, into the park, and downwards into the play area. A superbly crafted solid-wood staircase leads down to the garden floor with its outside terrace. Besides the generously dimensioned play zone, the facilities here include a classroom for schoolchildren, another lounge, and rooms for the technical equipment.
In contrast to the adult wards, the Children’s and Young People’s Clinic has been designed for very colourful effects. The impact is not overpowering, however, because friendly, soft colours have been chosen. In the overall concept, created by the art educationalist Christine Grimm, the flooring plays an important role. The product selected here was the nora® rubber flooring from Freudenberg Building Systems in Weinheim, Germany.
The Hegau Clinic has been installing this flooring in the entire hospital for years now, because “it’s given excellent service and we’ve been very satisfied with it in terms of design, quality and cleaning”, explains Rolf Euting, the project manager responsible for the major projects at the Hegau Clinic. What’s more, the composition of nora® floorcoverings means that there will be no emissions of substances in health-hazardous concentrations. The rubber floorings do not contain any PVC, plasticizers (phthalates) or halogens (e.g. chlorine).
Flooring symbolizes a meandering river
In the Children’s and Young People’s Clinic, the flooring used was the 2-mm-thick rolls of noraplan mega, which was installed in two colours, creating soft wavy lines. Following the preparatory work, such as grinding and levelling the screed, the flooring was fixed over its entire area using a solvent-free, eco-compatible dispersion adhesive. The installation work was carried out to a precise plan specifying all the shapes and colours involved.
The skirting, too, consists of noraplan mega. For this purpose, the flooring was led from the floor to the wall over a special cushioned-edge profile, located directly at the floor/wall transition point. The result is some visually flawless and ultra-hygienic cornering. After the initial cleaning procedure, a soft emulsion was applied and polished in. The rubber flooring is cleaned using a daily wash polish routine, and protected against slight mechanical stresses in order to preserve its value.
The wavy-line design conjures up associations of a meandering river with a sandy bank, which now and then laps into the patients’ rooms. Each open space in the corridor has been given a different colour. This is carried on into the rooms themselves, not least in the curtains, and is also matched with individualized room motifs. For instance, you traverse the blue space into the Fairytale or Sea Room, the green space into the Meadow or Tree Room, and the yellow space into the Safari or Sunflower Room. Because in hospitals patients spend most of their time lying in bed and often looking upwards, the rooms’ ceilings have been decorated with colourful drawings. They have been designed and drawn by children and youngsters, who painted the motifs on large, softly rounded wood boards.
Another distinguishing feature of the Children’s and Young People’s Clinic is the lower parapets throughout and the generously dimensioned glass façades, with glass panels in different shades of green, which ensure pleasant lighting effects inside the rooms. These warm green hues are also counter pointed outside the building: a strip about 7.0 m wide runs around the annex, featuring greenish-glittering gravel and easy-care oligotrophic plants, and keeping the inquisitive at bay. The colourful fantasy figures, designed by children and spray-decorated by youthful graffiti artists, strike a colourful keynote, and with their cheerful connotations doubtless banish quite a few sad thoughts.
Data
Client:
Hegau Clinic, Singen
Design:
Mangold und Thoma, Architects, Singen, Germany
Design concept for the Children’s and Young People’s Clinic:
Christine Grimm, Germany
Total floor space: approx. 3,000 m² - noraplan mega: 800 m² - noraplan mega acoustic: 1.600 m² - noraplan eco: 300 m²
Costs:
9.13 million euros (incl. modifications in the old building)
Capacity:
3 wards with 20 beds each (8 two-bed and 4 single-bed rooms)
Children’s Clinic with 20 beds: 8 mother-child rooms (1 - 2 beds + guest), 1 three-bed (young people’s) room, 4 single-bed rooms (2 with guest), 1 observation room (2 beds)
For further information on Freudenberg’s nora® rubber floorcoverings for the healthcare sector, please contact:
John Pean
Key Account Manager
Freudenberg Building Systems UK Ltd.
Tel: +44 (0) 7836 337 608
Email: John.pean@freudenberg.com