Herzog & de Meuron confirm their expertise in the design of spaces forhealing and recovery with Kinderspital Zrich, but replicability is questionableTo reach the new childrens hospital in Zrich, we have to leave behind the cobbled, medieval streets of the city centre and head up the hills. On a foggy, rainy Wednesday in February, they were green and wet, dotted with vineyards, fruit orchards and scattered residential buildings, at times offering glimpses of the lake and its shimmering grey expanse. Nestled between several other medical facilities and private hospital buildings, Zrichs private and university Kinderspital (or as it is affectionately known in these parts, the Kispi) was conceived by Baselbased practice Herzog & de Meuron over the course of a decade, following a competition win in 2011, and finally opened its doors to the public last autumn.Click to download drawingsApproaching the Kispi means walking alongside a long facade, where the wood is showing signs of the effect of the humid and wet Swiss winter. Many plants are already climbing up the walls, striving to grow and adapt to their new home, and getting ready to fully bloom come spring. The main entrance is shaped by two large wooden gates, which in a different universe could have signalled the entrance to Tolkiens Rohan. Imposing and disproportionately large, they give way to a low tunnel clad in timber and marked by portholes placed at a childs height to show glimpses of what awaits inside which leads to an impressive round tripleheight courtyard. Open to the sky, it is full of vegetation, trees and birdsong. A little girl is riding her bicycle around the green, humming along.This feels new, and it is. The Kispi opened in November 2024, with a considerable delay and more than CHF 150 million over budget, totalling a cost of CHF 761 million. When running massively over budget during construction, the Zrich government decided to inject CHF 250 million into the project; the move made the news but was described by the city as necessary. The Kispi is Switzerlands largest paediatric university hospital, founded in 1874 under the patronage of the private Eleonore Foundation. Offering a full spectrum of paediatric, medical and surgical care, including many rare diseases, makes it a meeting point for specialists and clinical research teams. One of the first impressions the hospitals medical director, Michael Grotzer, heard from a visiting mother was that she felt safe. Thats about the biggest compliment we can get, he points out. Entering the hospital, the first impression is indeed that this cannot be a hospital. With wooden ceilings throughout, Artek childrens furniture in waiting rooms, an expansive cafeteria with floor to ceiling windows, as well as impeccable (and expensive) finishes everywhere, it could be a youth hostel in an affluent neighbourhood, a disproportionately large mountain chalet or a coworking space in a Nordic country.Beyond material qualities, it is both the spatial considerations and organisation that set Kispi apart. Pierre de Meuron describes the hospital as a town with courtyards, streets, alleys and squares, providing clear and memorable orientation, plenty of daylight and a connection to nature. Christine Binswanger, Herzog & de Meuron partner and Kispi project lead, points to the idea of a holistically conceived, functional building that is calm and quiet despite its diversity. A linear distribution indeed offers easy access to the different facilities; a main central corridor connects all areas of the building, while large circular courtyards, skylights and expansive glazed areas bring daylight into the hospital.For Grotzer, who worked alongside the architects from 2018 until the opening, the fact that the Kispi doesnt look, feel or smell like a hospital is a helpful factor when considering healing processes. He mentions a 2024 University of Toronto study that probes the potential for incorporation of nature into the hospital environment as a component of a therapeutic hospitalisation showing exposure to nature leads to a better healing experience. For him, this confirms the power of architecture. On Kispis second floor, all 200 inpatient rooms have views to the nature outside and a small porthole window, placed at a childs height. One of the buildings most remarkable features, the rooms allow every child to have an independent space and bathroom, and welcome the parents as well, who can spend the night next to their children. While from the inside these are organised along gently curving corridors that run alongside the edges of the building, from the outside they appear as independent units, all with pitched roofs at different angles, like a linear sequence of mountain huts that are randomly squashed together. It is one of the buildings playful, almost humorous, moves, which seek to bring lightness and pleasure to those who inhabit it. The Kispi is made not in a childish way, but in a childspecific way, Grotzer points out, noting how the atmosphere plays a positive role. Parents report that the waiting times, which arguably make up most of the experience inside any medical facility, are made easier by themed rooms patients and siblings can play in a forest or outer space, or read in the Harry Potter cave. There is also an outdoor playground, pleasant break rooms where parents can work, eat and drink coffee or tea, as well as a school and kindergarten for children spending longer periods at Kispi. Raphael Heftis colourful lighting installation Starmix, on display at the spiral staircase, highlights the main access between floors, and is one of the many artworks that greet patients and their families at unexpected moments.A more unusual and particularly sobering space is the socalled room of silence, located in the basement, where bereaved families can spend time mourning the loss of a child. Past a screen of small sleigh bells, a fully woodpanelled room features diverse seating arrangements offering the possibility to sit together or in solitude. It is an ample, grave space, marked by a fulllength floortoceiling window revealing a large, ancient boulder found on site during construction. This element could evoke the stillness and muted comfort of a Zen garden, but it is also a testament to the magnitude of what takes place inside this building life, death, and everything in between.Medical facilities are concentrated on the ground and first floors, including an emergency department, the polyclinic entrance, a pharmacy and different ambulatory specialties. The Kispi is a private hospital, but in Switzerland, that does not mean that it is only for the few. The whole national health system is privatised, with every person in the country having mandatory private health insurance that allows access to health facilities in the country. At the Kispi, that means more than 8,000 inpatient cases, 140,000 outpatient and 42,000 emergency cases per year. The hospital specialises in oncology and dermatology, and serves a wide range of children coming from both Zrich and the neighbouring towns and villages. The spacious offices for staff, distributed along the short edges of the buildings first floor, include numerous typologies of meeting and break rooms that allow for a flexible use of the space, as well as garden offices filled with plants on all four corners of the building. Employees are encouraged to leave their belongings in a locker at the entrance and plug into any workstation they deem convenient for the day.As a complement to the Kispi, Herzog & de Meuron also designed a circular tower across the street, which hosts a sevenstorey paediatric research and teaching centre. The two buildings are almost polar opposites. While the horizontal hospital is a timberclad concrete frame with a facade that seeks to disappear within the surroundings, the research centre stands tall, a Guggenheim lookalike cylinder placed at the foot of the hill. Two large semicircular portals that seem to crawl up the facade serve as entrances, much like periscopes, and lead to what the architects call an agora: a central gathering space with a double-height ceiling that is surrounded by three auditoriums, a caf and, on the first floor, a study space. On the afternoon of my visit, the caf was full, the study space and auditoriums empty.For such a simple spatial concept a circle from where all other spaces radiate the building is confusing. A series of halfstorey accesses lead to dead ends or emergency exits, and finding a toilet proves to be a labyrinthine endeavour. The study space features a halfsunken circular shelf with embedded desks an impressive work of carpentry that further peers onto the agora below; hard to say if studying here is a voyeuristic activity or a focused one. Overall, spaces are clean and muted, overtaken by white plastered walls, a few wooden panels marking features such as the auditoriums and various exposed concrete spiral staircases a favourite Herzog & de Meuron trope, seen in several of their other projects, including the Kispi.While the idea of a hospital as a holistic experience is not that common, Kispis concept is a derivation of a formula that Herzog & de Meuron have already experimented with, namely in the REHAB Basel project also led by Binswanger and completed in 2002. This groundbreaking project for a clinic for neurorehabilitation and paraplegiology already put in practice the larger concept of the hospital as a city, in a lowrise, timberclad building organised around open courtyards. The formula seems to function so well that a further derivation is at the core of the firms New North Zealand Hospital in Denmark, currently under construction and expected to finish in 2026, with Binswanger part of the core team. The architects describe the lowrise, woodenclad building arranged around a courtyard as an appropriate typology for a hospital because it fosters exchange; across the various departments, the employees work on a shared goal: the healing of the ailing human being.Many established architecture firms copy and rehash their best ideas over and over again. The idea of the horizontal hospital might be a Herzog & de Meuron trope, but it is true that the architects have cracked the code for what makes a good space for healing and recovery. However, it is only thanks to the tightly coordinated work between the office and the medical teams, for over a decade, and the resources that enable it, that projects like Kispi can be made possible.2025-04-07Reuben J BrownShare AR April 2025Buy Now