Mario Cucinella Architects, in collaboration with AICOM, RINA Consulting, GAE engineering, Enzo Rizzato, and the consultancy of Mobility in Chain, has been commissioned to design a new hospital by the Local Health Authority of the city of Lecce in Italy.

The firm, among many other healthcare facilities, has also designed the ongoing project of The City of Health and Research and the new surgical Center for the San Raffaele Hospital, both in Milan. 

Named Sud Salento, the building is making a big sprawl on the site with an undulating form, while leving big green spaces around it. "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, sensitive to the intrinsic characteristic of the site, sustainable, and human," said Mario Cucinella Architects. 

"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 life, the "zoé", the vital condition related to health and the physical body, and "bios", in this case the individual existence, as equally important – so the spaces destined for diagnostics, emergencies and the primary needs of the disease are treated with the same design care of the spaces dedicated to the healing power of the environment.

The concept is a unitarian and iconic design, interacting with the particular morphology of the long and tight area, 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, to protect and safeguard the most sensitive areas such the triage and the patient's 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 to the work environment. 

Mario Cucinella Architects is an architectural firm running its offices in Bologna and New York. The firm is behind the projects ARPT New Headquarters, an exhibition structure designed for the cultural Golinelli Foundation in Bologna and the House Of Music in the town of Pieve di Cento, Italy.

All images courtesy of Mario Cucinella Architects

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