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Valle D’Hebron Hospital Campus · Spain

· Infrastructure, Urban, Institutional, Sustainability

Accesibility, Health and Sustainability

The key goal of the new design for the campus is to create a pleasant, accessible, healthy and sustainable environment, integrating all users and visitors, with an emphasis on the quality of life.

 

The campus has been conceived as a Mediterranean orchard. It is our estimation that all users have an appreciation for this landscape, and its very familiarity will bring comfort and tranquility to the hospital campus, at once contributing to patient healing while providing a vital space of leisure for the hospital staff.

The sloped terrain will in great part be graded as terraced plateaus separated by dry stone walls, allowing the introduction of vast amounts of exposed earth and other permeable substrates. This configuration avoids erosion and facilitates water retention. Various decorative fountains are planned across the site, as well as public drinking fountains.

Throughout the campus we have introduced plazas for the greater community. These are intimate natural spaces for gathering, meeting and sharing, featuring shade trees, tables and benches, play structures and space for café and food service.

In the center of the campus we propose duplicating the ground plane. The intense traffic streams associated with ambulances, delivery vehicles and private cars and taxis will be concentrated on a lower, quasi-underground level, leaving the upper level entirely free of vehicular traffic apart from occasional and light-duty maintenance traffic.

In order to improve the connectivity between different buildings and amenities, we propose an extensive network of pedestrian ways and bicycle paths on this upper, car-free plane. The path network will guarantee universal accessibility across the campus. It has been designed to be legible, coherent, extensive and efficient.

The landscaping design preserves as many of the existing, healthy trees as possible and proposes the introduction of low maintenance and drought-hardy autochthonous plants, shrubs and trees. There will be a number of community gardens across the campus. Overall, the area of green space will be two and a half times (2,5x) that which exists today.

Further measures to assure sustainability include the use of local, recycled and reused materials, the development of on-site, all-organic food production, the improvement of the campus water management through storm water control and urban heat-island reduction, the provision of facilities for recycling and composting and the use of solar powered, low-level lighting at night.

KEY INFO

CLIENT
Fundació Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron – Instituto de Investigación

LOCATION
Passeig Vall d’Hebron 119-129, Barcelona

BUILDING SIZE
1,425,000 sqft

ARCHITECTS
Belén Moneo, Jeff Brock

ARCHITECTS TEAM
Irene Alberdi, Raquel Prendes, Pedro Arnanz, Francisco Blázquez

DESIGN ARCHITECTS TEAM
Rafael Moneo, Belén Moneo, Jeff Brock

PLANS AND DRAWINGS