A city within a city

The development location for the MCRZ is in the Lombardijen district of Rotterdam. This location possesses the typical characteristics of an area on a city's outskirts: a highly dominating infrastructure and a lack of spatial coherence in the urban fabric. The design of a hospital and its related functions with a scale of around 100,000 m² GFA provides a unique opportunity to assign a new urban structure to this location.

The construction of a building of this scale is tantamount to constructing a city within a city. Typologically speaking, the design ties in with this notion. The main body of the hospital, called the monolith, comprises squares and streets, a number of courts and the hospital's central access.

On the top floors, the monolith is opened up to create strips.

Towers next to the hospital offer expansion potential or may serve as locations for hospital-related functions.

The hospital is divided into a number of centres combining interrelated activities, such as a Consultation centre, a Diagnostics centre and an Intensive centre. The Consultation centre's design is quite remarkable for its highly standardized nature, with all consultation and examination rooms having the same size. Directly above the Consultation centre is the Centre for Staff Education as well as offices with, for example, workstations for specialists, secretariats and meeting rooms. This creates great flexibility within the centres. The building has a uniform structure, so that different activities can take place in each space. The brick structure of the façade expresses uniformity as well. All of this produces a building that is very inconspicuous but is still able to resist the pressure of future changes.