The new building for Zurich Children’s Hospital in Lengg, Zurich, encompasses two parcels with the new acute-care hospital located on the southern plot, while the teaching and research building is on the northern plot. With a floor area of 79,215 sqm, the hospital covers the full spectrum of specialist fields in child and adolescent medicine, as well as in paediatric surgery.

The new building is horizontally layered, whereby each floor is shaped by its respective functions: examination and treatment, emergency and intensive care on the ground floor; flexible offices surrounding a central examination and treatment area on the 1st floor; patient rooms on the 2nd floor; a car park, delivery zone and building services equipment underground.

Due to this horizontality and its geometry, the acute-care hospital has no repetitions in the planning, so each plan had to be created from scratch. For this reason, the planners explicitly requested that BIM be used, because a project of such scale and complexity should be developed with modern methods.

Here, the support-structure model was primarily created for the ‘production’ of the building, so that the  ‘correction run’ (hundreds of plans and lists) could be generated directly from the model, semi-automatically. In just one year, 725 formwork plans and prefabricated-element plans were created and assessed, and more than 3,500 voids and drilled holes were evaluated, coordinated, adjusted and approved, resulting in several thousand reinforcement plans and lists.