Italian studio Mario Cucinella Architects has unveiled its design for a hospital and health park in Cremona, Italy, which appears to rise out of the ground in concentric rings.
The hospital will have a radial semicircular layout that rises to seven storeys and staggers to create roof terraces.
A semicircular colonnade will stand opposite the hospital to enclose a circular public park with a lake at the centre.
According to Mario Cucinella Architects, the Cremona hospital will be "a new model for healthcare architecture" that is well connected to the city.
It will include diagnostic and treatment services as well as leisure spaces that encourage social interaction to improve the care and wellbeing of patients.
The hospital will be located between Cremona's urban expansion and the Park of the River Po and Morbasco, creating a connecting point between the city and areas of nature.
The semicircular design of the hospital is intended as a "core" from which future hospital expansions can be built.
Mario Cucinella Architects also designed terraces spanning the nearby river with embankments and elevated pedestrian paths to provide a connection to the natural landscape.
"We were required to design spaces that are not only for patient care but are also for all the other people who spend every day in a hospital for whom it is a workplace," said studio founder Mario Cucinella.
"We were also required to plan in advance for buildings that will be able to transform and adapt to changing conditions, not only in response to health emergencies such as those we have recently experienced, but also to continuous developments in the medical field that bring about innovations, including in how hospitals are organised."
The studio described the hospital as a "city within a city". It will have seven floors above ground and two basement levels. Medical departments will be arranged with the aim of creating a collaborative hospital that fulfils patients' needs efficiently.
"Each patient will experience different hospital environments depending on the care pathway they take and on the intensity of treatment they require – the different departments are no longer separate 'cells' isolated one from another but are organised instead as different groups of professionals working on that particular patient," explained Mario Cucinella Architects.
"This results in a system where the whole hospital collaborates as a single department in caring for the patient, rather than as a sum of separated departments."
As part of the wider masterplan, the healthcare park will feature a forest surrounding the hospital with green paths passing through the building that connect patients with therapeutic activities, including meditation spaces, forest bathing, a community food forest and outdoor reading spaces.
The landscape will contain two "rings". The Vitality Ring will be a pedestrian route with sports and social spaces open to the public, while the Rural Ring will host events and activities surrounded by meadows and a lake at the centre.
"As a new piece of landscape for the city of Cremona, the healthcare park gives the community a new reference point that is animated by spaces for socialising as well as by quieter, more introspective places for care of the person and for general physical and mental well-being, in a setting of naturalness and urban biodiversity," said Mario Cucinella Architects.
Mario Cucinella Architects intends to mitigate the urban heat island effect and reduce the area's average temperature by around four degrees Celcius by adding natural elements to the landscape, such as vegetation and water features.
The studio also plans to minimise the environmental impact by implementing passive design strategies, including optimised orientation, wind permeability and natural daylight.
Other projects by Mario Cucinella Architects include a hospital in Milan wrapped in ceramic fins that can break down smog particles and a monolithic church on a hilltop in southern Italy.
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