DESIGNING HEALING SPACES
Designing healthcare has been a theme on Benedetto Camerana’s worktables for more than fifteen years, involving various aspects of civic life to which he has always been dedicated: urban well-being, hospitality, and care.
We faced this type of challenge for the first time in 2008-2009, winning grouping with responsibilities for architecture and landscape in competition for the design of the new hospital center in Novara. It is a true urban hub for health, research, and innovation. The preliminary design for City of Health included the hospital, a place of excellence for care, the Faculty of Medicine with a research center, and the extensive public garden of complex. The basic idea of project is that Health Hub is not an impermeable place but open to city, integrating with the surrounding landscape both environmentally and architecturally. The project enhances the urban structure and context in which it is situated, creating a green area dedicated to well-being of patients as well as citizens. In summary, the project takes care of urban center through nature, a fundamental gauge of the city’s health and the well-being of its inhabitants. A park cleans the air, provides refreshment, serves as a leisure and social space – we could say, prevention through architecture. Thus, the city and greenery become part of hospital complex, which in turn integrates with university into urban fabric. However, over all these years, the project has remained on standby, with an update in 2018 at Technical and Economic Feasibility Project (PFTE) level carried out by our studio. Subsequent concession and management competitions have yet to reach a conclusion.
Our studio has then developed other significant hospital projects. The first is in Piedmont: the New Verbano Cusio Ossiola Hospital, presented as a proponent but without a result in 2018 with CMB. The second, in 2020, is the pre-feasibility study for the development of various locations of the Cuneo Hospital, and third is project to enlarge the Health, Research, and Innovation Hub in a design, construction, concession, and management competition, currently underway, for which we expect to provide updates in course of 2024.
Following these projects, as mentioned earlier, came new competitions: open competition for New Maria Vittoria Hospital for the ASL city of Turin, spanning between the city and the large Pellerina Park – where health, in the strict sense, interacts with green space and well-being of the city. Just last month, there was the competition for the new hospital complex ASL Turin 5 (Cambiano, Moncalieri, Trofarello), in countryside outside Turin. These recent projects signify continuity of a “hospital line” where Benedetto Camerana has been contemplating theme of hospitality for more than ten years, considering how to integrate architectural volumes with highly technical functionality in context in which they arise, enriching the healthcare experience with landscape.