Camelia Sisak – On Game
Game is a natural means of expression, an ordinary activity which helps us develop, allows us to experiment and exploit the unknown; it is a complex phenomenon and a form of social interaction. It is a thing we should not forget when we grow up. It is bizarre to talk about games when discussing about such an architectural project as a hospital, a place rather suggesting coldness, isolation and interiority.
Three interventions at different scales in current or former hospitals, alternative spaces which share a feeling of playfulness, three games of different sizes: a project in Amsterdam, which brings functional innovations to the scheme of the classical hospital, by adding a space where the hospitalized children can forget they are ill; a purely aesthetic one in London, animating a commonplace façade; one in Barcelona, restricted at the level of the furniture, minimal, but efficient.
The “City of Children” starts from the very interesting and innovating theme of a competition for young architects initiated by the equivalent of the OAR in Holland together with the Ronald McDonald Children’s Foundation and won in 2003 by Sponge Architects & Rupali Gupta i.s.m. IOU Architecture. The final purpose was to create an alternative space inside the VU Amsterdam hospital, mediating between children and parents, between the status of ill person and that of a healthy one, between the hospital and the city around it. The new form of therapy proposed to the children is play therapy, which appears to be having positive effects on the sick. Therefore, play becomes an integral part of the project, from start to finish, from the outside to the inside.
The new unit was placed atop the existing hospital building, a tall, massive and monotonous building which is now overtopped by a playful glass box that interacts with the light, changing its colors and reflections according to the time of day. It is an open space affording a visually direct relationship with the city: you are above it, on the 10th floor, and enjoy the endless panorama. The glass façade is interspersed with titanium plates mounted at different angles, generating a faceted surface which appears like a precious diamond in the sunlight.
Inside we are dealing with a reproduction of the idea of city, hence the name Kinderstad, involving streets and houses, public meeting places and individualized capsules. However, this is not a horizontal city; the space also expands vertically, the link being provided by a monumental staircase which becomes a multipurpose support for various activities. The children’s attention is channeled as far away from the idea of hospital and as close to nature, relaxation and play as possible. Various boxes were scattered in the space, just like in Roald Dahl’s story in which a giant sneaks into the kids’ minds capsules with pleasant dreams. In these small rooms you can play football on the Ajax mini-ground, fly a plane or drive a race car, withdraw in the reading corner, play on the computer or watch movies. Possibly the biggest drawback of the inside landscape is the feeling of artificiality conveyed by these boxes which came with their own printed images of natural elements, such as moss, tree trunks, stones, water drops, suggesting a rather forced relationship with nature; but it was impossible to use natural materials, for hygiene reasons. The advantage of the excessive use of these textures resides in that they confer a surrealist feeling to the space, which encourages imagination, the result being a space inviting kids to dream, where the lamp is made of flowers and the house of water drops. All these details betray the architects’ desire to experiment.
Equally experimental are the new façade works undertaken at the Guy Hospital in London; here, however, the endeavor has turned out to be more mature, a simple intervention, but yielding maximum results. Thomas Heatherwick was already used to prototypes and experiments or artistic installations in public spaces. From bridges which shrink like a snail to Great Britain’s impressive Shanghai pavilion in 2010, he approaches confidently many projects deemed unconventional by others. In this case we are dealing with the construction of a new façade for the hospital’s power station and access area. Who says that a hospital façade should also be aseptic and commonplace, when it can be playful? The outcome is an organic canvas, undulating regularly, which surrounds the street corner at the level of the passers-by. It is a technical innovation which gives rise to a façade that stands out thanks to the distortion of a straight plane. The construction technique is borrowed from the wickerwork technique, only twigs were replaced by stainless steel threads. The perception is that of an oversized canvas, an almost virtual image.
The third project boils down to a mere gesture of separation between the public and the private, in a complicated, stylistically charged context. Three furniture objects form a whole, a ribbon which adjusts to the space to accommodate several uses, from office to reception desk, from cupboard to counter and seating place. The furniture object is like a toy which stretches, twists, changes its proportions, going round pillars or sticking to walls. The intention of the architects was to create an object which does not integrate perfectly, so as not to alter the beauty of the original space, boasting a lot of personality, and to allow the two spaces to be read as overlapping images. All the features of the existing modernist space, symmetrical and balanced, but also overwhelmed with decorations, are highlighted by this simple, linear, broken and asymmetric object. What is obvious here as well as in the other two projects is that they succeed in getting rid of the heavy hospital sensation, going in the opposite direction, the careless world of the game.
RAICHDELRIO ARCHITECTS, Ave Maria Pavilion Entrance Hall Intervention, photos ©Santiago Garcés
HEATHERWICK STUDIO, Boiler Suit, photos © Edmund Sumne
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