‘Like the Guggenheim!’ Inside Zurich’s staggering, revolutionary new hospital for kids

From the chalet-style patient ‘cottages’ to the walls designed for scribbling on, Herzog & de Meuron’s Kinderspital is a stylish, healing, child-friendly miracle – and it cost less than UK equivalents

‘Hospitals are the ugliest places in the world,” says Jacques Herzog. “They are a product of blind functionalist thinking, while neglecting basic human needs.” The Swiss architect has a point. With their low ceilings, windowless corridors and harsh fluorescent lighting, hospitals can sometimes seem consciously calibrated to make you feel ill, if you didn’t already. Attempts to jolly them up with coloured cladding panels and art commissions do little to distract from the bleak reality of buildings where the human experience – for patients, doctors and visitors alike – is often an afterthought.

Herzog insists it doesn’t have to be like this. And he has proof. He is standing in the circular entrance courtyard of his practice’s stunning riposte to the last century of grim healthcare buildings. It is a tranquil space reminiscent of a sylvan spa complex, ringed with sculpted wooden slats and planted with tall trees and ferns, where light bounces off marble sculptures that glisten in the drizzle. A broad gallery deck encircles the floor above, with a touch of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, where bedrooms spill out on to wide, daylit corridors. Entering through revolving pink glass doors, you find a concrete staircase spiralling down into the foyer, curling around a core of colourful neon tubes that look ready to beam you upstairs.

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