Italian job, The

Hospital Development, Jul 1999 by Nord, Romano Del

Romano Del Nord reports on the designs for a children's hospital scheme that relocates a unit in Florence, including substantial ambulatory care provision in sensitive settings.

An international design competition for transferring the Meyer childrens' healthcare facilities in Florence into an old existing hospital offered the opportunity for developing a design strategy based on cost/benefit evaluation and rigorous quality assessment of the final proposed solution.

Here I illustrate the methodology and the design experience by which the architectural team (CSPE, based in Florence and Ashen and Allen of San Francisco) has succeeded in satisfying the competition requirements through the balanced combination of a totally new block strictly integrated with the upgraded existing building.

Specific emphasis has been attributed to the environmental performances of interior and exterior spaces in order to create a facility characterised by a human dimension, and particularly, one which responds to a child's viewpoint. The presence of a monumental garden area all around the building, has been used as a particularly successful solution for the public client organisation.

The project solution has been defined by a very interdisciplinary team with the participation of qualified experts in environmental psychology, sociology of children, garden design, children's hospital architecture, cost/benefit evaluation and historical building restoration. The design experience dealt with the technical and methodological approach suggested for the process of relocation of the New Paediatric Pole A Meyer hospital into the "Villa Ognissanti" area of Florence. An historical building, of great monumental and environmental value, has been chosen to become what is likely to be the most advanced and distinguished children hospital in Italy, through a complex restructuring and enlargement. The possibility to conform the structure of the monumental building to the specific children's exigencies has been analysed through a careful and systematic feasibility study. This also pointed out the very important role of the nearby historical park, the fantastic vegetation and the particular hilly configuration of the area.

A multidisciplinary design team has been created to deal with this complex project and external contributions have been involved in the technical organisation. In particular, the team was formed using the following criteria:

* a group of technical planning leadership (CSPE and Anshen & Allen), skilled in paediatric hospital planning;

* a group skilled in environmental psychology, in relationship sociology, child psychology and ergonomic psychology;

* a group skilled in landscape planning, in restoration of monumental property and environmental impact evaluation;

* a group skilled in structural evaluation and consolidation;

* a group skilled in environmental physics and in services design;

* a group skilled in medical organisations.

In this team, the medical staff, the organisers and the technicians of the hospital are in continuous collaboration. The operative model developed for the programme has been characterised by three principal aspects:

* identification of interfaces, that is to say attribution of separate roles and specific responsibilities to each decision-maker;

* definition of the procedures and the necessary instructions for practising each activity and the transferring the information;

* definition of the programme, that is to place the practices into different operative sections and to focus the turning points in which any re-examination of the project should be possible.

The most important aspects in the development of the plan have been the following: the methods of analysis and of interpretation of project's constraints; the briefing process and the definition of the design inputs, and lastly the development of innovative solutions linked to the project's specificities (the peculiarities of users and of the building).

As far as the methods of analysis of

* the context are concerned, the most important elements are:

* the 'ethnic identity' of the place, ie the historical origin of the formation of Villa Ognissanti hospital;

* the 'signs' of the place, that is the morphology of the buildings and of the natural elements that characterise planimetrically the area and that represent the semantic matrix;

* the "naturalistic value" of the environment that means respecting of trees and bushes (which are protected by law);

* the `environmental peculiarity', ie the necessity to protect the integrity of the hilly landscape and its natural resources;

* the 'historical and monumental value' of the buildings, that is the necessity to protect the architectural integrity by using a not invasive and up grading reorganisation.

BRIEFING MANAGEMENT

The briefing function has been one of the most important aspects of the decisional process. It has to define, value and correct the user's exigencies, mark the necessities of the project, assess the strategical, technical and organising alternatives and create a functional programme in which it might be possible a strict co-operation between planners and employer. It also allows them to manage the broad possibility of uncertainty and of evolution of the employer's requirements.