Children's Hospital, digital
Zurich, Switzerland
Competition 1st prize 2011-2012
Project since 2014
Commencement 2018
Planned occupancy 2024
Children's
Hospital.
Overview
Client
Kinderspital Zürich – Eleonorenstiftung, Zurich, Switzerland
Architecture and Overall Direction
ARGE KISPI
Herzog & de Meuron, architecture
Gruner AG, overall direction
Team ZPF
Konstantinos Adamakos, Taylan Beyaşahin, Giancarlo Casutt, Enrico Cristini, Damian Dängeli, Heike Egli-Erhart, Meran Hassan, Flavia Hofmeier, Johanna Hohenwarter, Yannik Jaggi, Antje Käser-Wassmer, Luis Looser, Franck Mahler, Dimitrios Mamadas, Jonathan Mazzotta, Kata Aletta Orbán, Carlos Pacheco, Jacqueline Pauli, Fabio Pesavento, Roberto Plaza, Susanna Quaresma, Patrick Raulf, Nico Ros, Christian Rudin, Dario Ruff, Remo Thalmann, Kay Unterer, Sander van Baalen, Robert Vögtlin, André Weis, Ann-Christin Westkamp
Publication Tec21 28/2020
The new building for Zurich Children’s Hospital in Lengg, Zurich, encompasses two parcels. The new acute-care hospital is being built on the southern plot, while the laboratory, teaching and research building LLF is being built on the northern plot. With a floor area of 77,300 m², the hospital will cover the full spectrum of specialist fields in child and adolescent medicine, as well as in paediatric surgery.
The new building is horizontally layered, whereby each floor is shaped by its respective functions: examination and treatment, emergency and intensive care on the ground floor; flexible offices surrounding a central examination and treatment area on the 1st floor; patient rooms on the 2nd floor; a car park, delivery zone and building services equipment underground.
Due to this horizontality and its geometry, the acute-care hospital has no repetitions in the planning, so each plan had to be created from scratch. For this reason, the planners explicitly requested that BIM be used, because a project of such scale and complexity should be developed with modern methods.
Here, the support-structure model was primarily created for the ‘production’ of the building, so that the ‘correction run’ (hundreds of plans and lists) could be generated directly from the model, semi-automatically. In just one year, 725 formwork plans and prefabricated-element plans were created and assessed, and more than 3,500 voids and drilled holes were evaluated, coordinated, adjusted and approved, resulting in several thousand reinforcement plans and lists.
In issue 28 of the magazine TEC21, released in September 2020, ZPF Ingenieure, together with Herzog & de Meuron, report on their experiences during the implementation. The hierarchies within the planning teams, for instance, turned out flatter, as each individual feeds the model themselves. Although there is a greater amount of work involved, it leads to higher quality.
As in most BIM projects, model-based coordination for the new Zurich Children’s Hospital building constituted a central application that first had to be developed for the collaboration between the architectural office Herzog & de Meuron, the planners of the support structure at ZPF, and the specialised building-services-equipment planning. When the project began, guidelines, best-practice recommendations and even standards were only to be found abroad. Likewise, it was necessary to develop roles and control mechanisms as the project progressed. Moreover, the following two factors always had to be kept in mind: firstly, who has control over a model at what stage, and secondly, when is a model frozen and not to be modified any further for the time being.