OOSTBROEK HEALTHCARE CENTRE
Location: Utrecht
Status: Educational
Program: Hospital / Healthcare
Year: 2021
Our hospitals will start to get larger and larger as the number of people on this earth will rise. Due to medical solutions our stays in these hospitals will get shorter as we can cure ourselves from diseases. But as we are getting older, we will spend more time in the hospital. The paradox of healing from diseases and becoming more and more dependent on the medical environment in order to heal causes the need of the hospital as a welcoming and comforting place to become more and more meaningful.
The environment of the Hospital is in many cases experienced as distant from everyday life. Being ill and having to live in two worlds at the same time can be hard to bear and architecture can have an influence on that. Daily life should not stop the moment you end up in the medical environment. It is therefore essential that we design the medical environment to our wishes of “normal” life and not to create a second world in which medical knowledge is placed first and us as humans second. Oostbroek Healthcare centre is designed with the aim of creating such a welcoming place.