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.

The patient rooms are realised as (lightweight) wooden structures with a high degree of prefabrication (element-based design) and mounted on the uppermost floor slab. This makes it possible to arrange the patient rooms according to their spatial and functional requirements, without any dependency on the column grid beneath. The repetitive nature of the patient rooms is ideally suited to element-based serial prefabrication in the factory. Each room is a small wooden structure of its own, self-supporting and inherently braced. The final touches are applied to the rooms on the construction site, so the result is not a ‘container look’, but friendly and comfortable rooms for the children and their parents.