VENICE-MESTRE, ITALY (2008)
This 680-bed hospital offers all general hospital services, plus in the future a Proton Beam Therapy and Treatment Centre. It is conceived architecturally as an aid to the healing process. Its grand entrance hall, a glassed space more than 660 feet (200 mt) in length, 85 feet (26 mt) in depth, and 90 feet (30 mt) in height, is a veritable winter garden, with trees, flowers, and aromatic plants welcoming all patients and their visitors. It is the first fully 'green' hospital ever built. Patients approaching the hospital, either by car, bus, or from the newly dedicated train station serving it, pass by a large extension of outside green areas surrounding the building, visible from every patient's room, to enter the grand winter garden serving as its reception hall. The reverse ziggurat section of the building ensures that half of its patients have a direct view of the winter garden, while the other half have a personal view to the plants growing outside their windows in deep earth and plant covered terraced containers. The vision guiding this design was that the building should help allay the fears of the incoming patients and contribute to their recovery in their convalescing period. Accordingly, the patients can perambulate on a series of dedicated high terraced platforms overlooking the winter garden. For those recovering patients, not yet able to distance themselves far from their room, every floor offers lounges overlooking the winter garden. To avoid the visual intrusion of the very large mass of service and functional buildings completing this hospital, all surrounding volumes the administration, the large parking garage, the mortuary and the adjacent chapel, as well as all the laboratories and operating rooms have been bermed up on three sides and covered with planting, as are their roofs.