Vital Village
Honorary Mention
The Transformation of Health Care, International architectural ideas competition, 2009
Dutch Centre for Health Assets (DuCHA), Rotterdam, arranged this competition to focus the attention on a major challenge that exists in Europe. Hospital sites need to be redeveloped, and a modern system of healthcare has to be implemented.
Vital Village got the Honorary Mention for its modest and effective urbanistic strategy – and it was “too” real according to a jury member!
The proposal for the site is based on European urban tradition, where built layers cover and replace each other. This means diverse, organic and flexible redevelopment within the strong guidelines given by the site: appreciation of the green, respect of the urban hierarchy and spreading every-day urbanism in to the old hospital milieu.
The basic idea of ”Vital Village” is to create a new type of hospital milieu with pleasant and comprehensible scale, easy orientation and flexible space-structure in the long run. The existing structures are re-used and the best qualities of the site are maintained and emphasized. The new hospital is made by adding compact and universal pavilion-units to the old “stem” of post-war building. The size and outlooks of the pavilions are adjusted to the urban structure around the site. They are breaking the traditional image of a massive, monolithic hospital and hiding the re-used building in the middle of a new urban block.
