Safety, Trust, and Recognizability
In our view, the building for the NPOC is a building that speaks. It is a building that reads as one unit. A distinctive appearance where everyone who enters feels comfortable. It is a building that appeals to both a two-year-old child and a 16-year-old walking in with their parents. The building exudes trust. The confidence that you are in the best hands for pediatric oncology care. The trust that arises not only from the excellent care provided but also from the building itself, which imparts a sense of safety and control. The clear layout of the hospital provides a sense of calm and ensures that anyone entering the hospital understands how it operates.
Space for Air and Light
Especially in the challenging time that everyone who comes here experiences, the building provides space for air. Air is difficult to architecturally design, but leaving space for the air flowing through the building can be made tangible. Space for air and light between the programmatic part of the hospital. Space between the leaves of the tree, light and air between the clustered rooms, designed like leaves on a branch of the tree.
Green
In our view, every individual benefits from greenery. Green brings tranquility, a sense of the past, primal trust, of lounging in the meadow, hearing the rustle of the wind, of that beautiful outdoor world that lies ahead at the end of the treatment. The inspiration from nature also ensures that the design mirrors nature: the building lacks sharp corners but is characterized by curves and natural transitions from one space to another.
It’s almost like a tree: The tree stands with its roots (the operating rooms, ICU, laboratory, pharmacy, clinical research, radiotherapy, radiology, nuclear medicine, management, support services, and staff facilities), firmly in the ground…
The openness around the trunk invites you to come in and under the tree, just as the hospital entrance invites you to enter, stay, and go through the nodes (the trunk) to the branches of the different units. Each unit branch then splits out with leaves. The patios bring light deep into the tree, and it feels safe wherever you are.
