Healing Clinic

01 Idea

Hospitals usually make people wait, and waiting typically happens in a windowless corridor under fluorescent light. At Şifa Clinic we are moving the waiting areas to the best parts of the building, around inner gardens that receive daylight. The six-storey outpatient centre is organised around two vertical garden voids; on every floor patients will wait for their turn looking at a treetop or the sky. Creating a calming space without compromising clinical efficiency is the real subject of this project.

02 Space

The plan rests on two separate circulation systems: a front route for patients overlooking the gardens, and a rear corridor for staff, supplies and sterilisation. The two never cross. Consulting rooms are modular; a 3.6-metre structural grid lets each department combine rooms as it needs. The ground floor holds registration, pharmacy and a café; the basements house imaging and parking. The top floor is given over to physiotherapy and a roof garden.

03 Material and construction

The concrete frame has now reached the fourth floor; the basement walls and the radiation-shielded walls of the imaging department are complete. The facade will be beige fibre-reinforced concrete panels with vertical aluminium sun fins. Inside, hygiene and warmth must be considered together: easy-clean rubber floors in corridors, and in waiting areas surfaces that look like timber but withstand disinfectants. The trees for the garden voids have spent a year acclimatising in a nursery.

04 Light

For consulting rooms, natural light is both a psychological and a medical necessity: seeing skin colour accurately matters to a doctor. So while giving every room an external window, we calculated the angle of the sun fins to block direct sun but admit skylight. The garden voids provide a second source of light deep into the floors. Artificial light will change colour temperature through the day — cool in the morning, warmer in the afternoon. At night, when the clinic closes, only the gardens will be lit.