Mario Cucinella Architects to design new "Sud Salento" hospital in Italy

Italian practice Mario Cucinella Architects (MC A) — together with AICOM, RINA Consulting, GAE engineering, Enzo Rizzato, and the consultancy of Mobility in Chain — was recently commissioned by the city of Lecce's Local Health Authority to design the new "Sud Salento" hospital in Italy. 

MC A is no stranger to designing healthcare facilities. Some of their ongoing projects include The City of Health and Research and a new surgical center for the San Raffaele Hospital, both located in Milan.

The team shared more details about their winning Sud Salento proposal below.

“The vision behind the concept of the new hospital comes from the objective of combining the functional need of realizing a high-standards public project with the ambition of realizing an architecture that is sensitive to the intrinsic characteristic of the site, sustainable, and human. The project aims to combine the efficacy and rigor of the technique with the creativity and warmth of a design that has a ‘humanization’ purpose.

The project considered the two aspects of a patient's experience: The ‘zoé’, the vital condition related to health and the physical body, and ‘bios’, in this case the individual existence, as equally important. As a result, the spaces designated for diagnostics, emergencies and primary needs are carefully designed to create a healing environment for patient”, the firm describes.

“The concept is a unitarian and iconic design that interacts with the particular morphology of the long and tight site area, which is constricted between two road infrastructures. The architecture unfolds in three main volumes, developed on three floors, which like a living entity flexes and recedes over the limits of the lot, in order to protect and safeguard the most sensitive areas such as the triage and patients' rooms. These setbacks, which do not interrupt the internal functional connections between the different areas, consents to realize some big landscape elements: a series of hills covered in trees, which further protect against noise and offer undeniable quality views to the patient's space and work environment for hospital staff.”