Spoken by Paul Curry—Director, COX Architecture

Starting to design the Hospital from scratch, really looking at what the site opportunities were, understanding the background of the existing hospital and the idea of ‘the People’s Hospital’ and what that meant to the people of Footscray and the Western suburbs of Melbourne.

Through the community consultation process, we had this beautiful gentleman touch on the idea that, what if the new Hospital was a place that we could come to live well, not only to get better. So we really built on that idea to create a new type of hospital than what we had seen or experienced before.

So, probably the most important design feature of the internal space is actually the outside and the connection to the parkland outside and then, wrapping the Hospital Street around the village green so that we’re using the connection to green space not just as a connection to nature but as a wayfinding gesture as we move through the hospital street. The connection of daylight to the space and how that helps us circulate, bringing that internally through natural materiality, so lots of warm finishes, lots of natural timbers, fresh colours, drawing on the landscapes of the greens that we see in the tiles for the park lifts or the furniture, through to the blue tiles for the river lifts at the other end of the hospital street, really trying to design a space that feels calm, feels warm and inviting, but is also easy to navigate.

We had a lot of collaboration, a lot of design integration with the landscape architects, Tract, through the whole process. So, really, working together hand in hand, designing internally and externally. So, how the connections of the outside space might inform what we do internally, and similarly, how what we’re doing inside the hospital might influence the landscape moves externally and then carrying that through the landscape spaces through the upper levels of the hospital as well.

Through Plenary Health, we set up our own community group through the entire design process. So, going right back to the competitive bid phase, which was a really interesting phase where we gained insight into the community strength behind the project, something unlike what we had ever seen before, and how much the idea of the new Hospital meant to the people of Footscray and the Western suburbs.

The people really represented all aspects of the community across all different cultures and also abilities as well, touching on the connection to the Village Green. We had this blind representative on the group that spoke about her navigation of space through her experience of light.

So, while she can’t see any objects, she could perceive the change in light and use that as a way of navigating so, it was a really beautiful process bringing in all different ethnic backgrounds, understanding what different sensitivities might be for different cultures.

So, things like breaking down the institutional nature of a hospital and giving smaller, human-scaled spaces different ways to enter a large hospital, so that it doesn’t feel daunting, and a whole range of other aspects as well.

Designing the Hospital, working together with a really well-known health practice, Billard Leece Partnership, and working on a project where, from a design aspect and also a clinical aspect, one of the first things we all decided on was that we wanted to be able to move through the hospital and have it feel seamless.

So where, in the past, there might be a hospital project where there’s a noticeable difference between where one designer starts and the other stops, we really wanted it to feel seamless through all aspects. So, working together hand-in-hand with Billard Leece Partnership to design all spaces from public through to private with the bedrooms was really important to all of us.

I think I have lots of favourite places within the hospital. By far, my favourite is the Hospital Street and the scale of space and how it feels, how it flows, the connections internally and externally. But then even moving through the upper levels of the hospital, every patient bedroom and the views that they offer around Melbourne is this amazing connection with context, whether it’s the internal context inside with the Village Green or the outside context within the broader Melbourne, So, lots of spaces, but by far the Hospital Street is the signature space for me.