This project results as a collaboration between ETSAB. Barcelona School of Architecture and the Can Ruti Hospital to develop a new final thesis line which aims to explore a case-study based on real conditions. After a year of research in collaboration with Hospital staff and architects’ specialists in health architecture, the project wants to serve as a tool to re-think our hospitals typology and the relation they have with the way we moved across our cities. The project developed by Ruben Casquero and Adriana Aguirre Such is based on three different points of view:

Victim and executioner: they studied the relation between the building and its accessibility, asking which is the role of health buildings in the 'Post-car' city.

Hybrid of context: they explore the possibilities of relation between the hospital and its surroundings, in this case, a natural and protected park. Hospitals like Can Ruti work rather as a city than as a building, in their inside they have streets, facilities, a never-ending activity, etc. The project imagines a Hospital which emerges from a park, mixing with the landscape and aiming to transform one of the most compact existing building typologies.

Consumer society: The constant activity and the technological advance makes Hospitals difficult to adapt. The proposal proposes open, mutant and constantly transforming processes, based on dry construction which allows the building to increase or decrease depending on its time.

This three dimensions represent a new hospital typology, a paradigm shift which aims to ask ourselves about our established conventions, trusting in the potential of our contexts and the possibility of a better future.

KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does it address?

AAS | RC On one hand, we observe and question the concept of the private transport use and the traffic it creates. In this direction, we ask ourselves how the reality of the certain facilities in the post-car city would be. On the other, we consider that a sustainable project can only be understood from the awareness of time as an agent that creates imbalances. This statement leads us to explore the methodological consequences of the unexpected in the architectural design, considering time as the only constant variable.

Both questions are addressed to Can Ruti Hospital, in Barcelona, as a case-study. The relationship between pollution and people’s health, requires hospitals to be pioneers in those strategies that encourage healthy mobility.

KOOZ What would you say are pivotal architectural examples of the development of this though time?

AAS | RC Until the Renaissance, the patient and the environment were the main focus in hospital design. However, since the Enlightenment, technology and medical science became the main concern. This paradigm shift reconfigured the traditional view of the hospital concept and its typology.

In 1784 the first hospital pavilion appeared as alternative to the Parisian ‘Hôtel Dieu’. With the discovery of penicillin, miasma lost its importance in design and this led to the construction of the first compact prototypes in the beginning of XX. Century. The obsession with efficiency in the mid-twentieth century would lead to sectorize buildings according to functions and sexes, concentrating them on three typologies: H, T and K. This development reaches its peak with the ‘tower plus podium’ typology, which is the object of our case-study.

KOOZ How would you define the current status of the hospital typology? How does it reflect contemporary preoccupations and our medical relationship?

AAS | RC Hospitals are little cities, with the multiple purposes, circulations and the unceasing activity, therefore essentially, they are a complex organisation and their definition requires time.

We found Foucault’s contribution in defining modern hospitals crucial, as in his works, such as ‘Surveiller et punir’ (1975) and in ‘L'integration de l'hopital a la technologie moderne’ (1978) not only does he emphasise the price of an individual, the desire to avoid epidemies or the transformation of medical wisdom, he also highlights the importance of displacing the religious power to science which becomes the main factor in seeing hospitals not just a place for healing, but also a place for knowledge.

As users, we can frequently observe our relationship with health system located in buildings, which are the legacy for understanding architecture as a machine, where efficiency, as a consequence of the industrialization culture, is the only relevant part of the design. The absence of dynamic strategies in those buildings mean that their transformation capacity is very low, where the constant technical-scientist development quickly turns the buildings obsolete, producing a serious impact on the health economy.

KOOZ How do you expect this to change and develop in the near future? What do you expect to be the most important and significant changes?

AAS | RC Flexibility, adaptability and putting the patient at the center of the discussion are one of the main factors in reducing the daily cost of a person in a hospital. In this sense, it is important to consider recent research on environmental psychology in the health of patients, requiring spaces to respond accordingly.

New hospitals tend to simplify complex systems, they are hybrid buildings, with little medical character, integrated in the city and small in size. As the contact with nature is considered relevant again, returning to the principles of the medieval or Greek virtues, understanding health should not solely focus on the absence of the diseases. It is a much wider phenomenon, that concerns physical, mental and social welfare. Perhaps architecture and urbanism have something to contribute.

KOOZ What three adjectives would you associate to the hospital of today and that of tomorrow?

AAS | RC Introverted, compact, static. Open, disperse (even home-based!), ever-changing.

Bio

Adriana Aguirre Such (Donostia-San Sebastián 1990), Architect granted with honors degree by the Barcelona School of Architecture. She develops her practice as an urbanist collaborating with different entities, from the public administration to offices such as Paisaje Transversal and Landlab. She writes for the german Bauwelt magazine. Her work has been published in the Venice Bienal of Architecture 2018 and her texts, in several blogs about architecture, urbanism and politics.

Ruben Casquero (Barcelona, 1991). Architect granted with honors degree by the Barcelona School of Architecture, with an exchange year in the Glasgow School of Arts. His work has been published in the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2018. He is currently studying a Master’s in Contemporary Humanities and he develops its practice between freelance projects and as a member of ‘Ravetllat arquitectura’ office.