Fischer Architekten AG

Competition 1st prize

The new Lucerne Canton Hospital Sursee is to be built at the northern edge of the settled area on land currently used for agricultural purposes. Given the short life cycle of a hospital, to ensure that the location can be developed long-term it was decided to build two generations of the main hospital building as well as a multi-storey car park, ancillary buildings and a care home and to use urban design concepts in positioning them on the site available.

The placing of the four buildings takes account of the nearby motorway, the quality of the landscape, the different lifecycles of the buildings, and the complex access situation. The site starts with a transportation space with a central bus stop. It is adjoined by the calm, traffic-free green centre of the hospital grounds that provides an unmistakable address and creates an identity for the campus-like ensemble; this space will retain all its qualities beyond the life cycle of the hospital.

The main entrance to the hospital can be identified from afar. From here visitors are led deeper into the building by a two-storey spatial figure, lit from two main courtyards. The internal courtyards that increase in number and size vertically and the clear circulation and services structure produce spaces of different depths on each floor that can be flexibly programmed and enjoy an optimum amount of daylight.

The multi-storey car park building responds to its relatively prominent position with a strikingly slender concrete structure and a lushly planted facade. In contrast the hospital and the ancillary buildings are timber-built with massively constructed underground floors. The prefabricated dry timber construction system uses purely mechanical connections, ensures speedy construction, reduces the grey energy used in production, and allows the building components to be reused later. Photovoltaic modules integrated in the facades produce energy while also providing shade and protection from the weather.