Spoken by Paul Curry—Director, COX Architecture

Quite often architects want to start with designing a building. For us, a really important component of the project was the public realm, and the public realm is just as much about the external as it is about the internal. So, designing the two together, not separately, is what creates the vibrant public realm that we can walk through and experience and connect with.

Drawing on pieces of research right at the beginning of the project and using information like the World Health Organisation, that recommends every person in a city requires 50 square meters green open space to live healthily, and whilst a park in the middle of a hospital is not going to fix a city, the idea that a hospital is a major civic project and can help the greater part of the city and show what we can do to create a better environment for everyone was really an idea that we latched onto. So, creating the park at the center of the project and then wrapping the hospital around that park to connect all the spaces to it was how we approached the master plan.

The base two to three levels of the hospital are really where all of the highly public components are; a lot of fresh food, the retail, the cafes, the hospital reception, the ambulatory care, all the spaces that the public will interact with day to day. And then moving through the sandstone-coloured cladding that we see on the upper levels of the building really transitioning through to the subacute spaces and the semi-public private areas of the hospital. And then moving through to the crystalline form with the IPU tower above all the patient bedrooms, which is a highly private environment that enables a greater degree of visual connection to the surrounding context where you have that privacy and that elevated component.

We recycled a number of the materials from the original houses that were on the site, and even coming back to the terracotta precast concrete around the public realm, the history of Footscray and the broader area had a lot of brick making in its past. So drawing on that brick heritage to inform the colour and texture of the precast and having that textural quality that you can walk up to and touch and feel, is unique. The softer forms of the hospital is really coming back to that nature and experiencing space, so having spaces that flow from one to another, so deliberately making sure that we don’t have sharp edges that might feel confronting.

An unexpected component of the external landscape is actually the spaces beneath. So, the subterranean public car park spaces from the Village Green, you’ll see the voids that are created through the landscape to enable daylight to penetrate to those lower levels. Seeing and feeling how much of an impact that natural light makes to the subterranean space of the car park and a visitor’s first-time experience in navigating that space has been a really lovely outcome.

We need everybody to feel that the project is walkable and easily navigatable, but also from a three-dimensional scale point of view, so standing out in the Village Green, using architectural moves with the pergola and the roof overhang to bring down space and height to something that feels much more human, rather than the enormity of the overall form, so we can transition through the landscape and step through spaces that are very open and even open to the sky, through to spaces that might be more of a domestic scale that is more welcoming.

What makes Footscray Hospital different to other hospital projects is really the focus on the experience for everyone, whether it’s the public visitor, whether it’s the patient, whether it’s the staff working in the hospital, really understanding that experience and how we can make what might be quite an unpleasant experience in a hospital that little bit better. If we can have that small positive impact on a moment of sickness or sadness, then I think that’s a good measure of having designed a new benchmark for a hospital building.