REHAB Basel,
clinic for neurorehabilitation and paraplegiology
Basel, Switzerland
1999-2002
Transformation and extension 2018-2020
Rehab.
Overview
REHAB Basel,
Client
Rehab AG, Basel, Switzerland
Architecture
Herzog & de Meuron, Basel, Switzerland
Landscape architecture
August + Margrith Künzel, Basel, Switzerland
Team ZPF
Heike Egli-Erhart, Ana Maria Eigenmann, Hans-Peter Frei, Franck Mahler, Helmuth Pauli
Awards
Auszeichnung Guter Bauten Kanton Basel-Landschaft Kanton Basel-Stadt 2002
This rehabilitation clinic is in the westernmost part of Basel, right on the French border. The building has to meet complex requirements, as the individual needs of paraplegics and brain injury sufferers must be satisfied, as well as the therapeutic prerequisites for their successful rehabilitation. Treatment rooms, wards and recovery rooms are distributed across three floors.
Wood dominates the appearance, while concrete and steel carry the loads. The way the building is used varies from floor to floor, so the grid of solid steel columns varies accordingly and as the span width changes, so does the thickness of the flat concrete slabs. The roof of the therapy pool, coated with a black plastic skin, looks like a massive boulder in the middle of a spatial continuum. Its concrete shell is penetrated by round openings, resembling a starry sky in the semi-darkness of the pool room.
Measuring 120 x 90 m, the building has no need for dilatation joints. The support structure is designed to cope with the possible addition of another storey extending across the entire building. The flat slabs rest on a dynamic grid of solid steel columns, so the slab thickness can be adapted to the span width. The therapy pool facility is a polygonal distorted pyramid, consisting of a concrete folded-plate structure with staggered round perforations. While the balcony slabs, made from wooden elements, rest on overhanging steel beams, the thoroughfare in the entrance courtyard is spanned by a pre-stressed ribbed slab that is over 23 m long.
Transformation and extension
In 2018, REHAB decided to establish a new SAP ward, a station geared towards patients with behavioural disorders, and to use the premises of the previous day clinic on the ground floor for this purpose. The only conversion required since the clinic was commissioned in 2000, it demonstrates for the first time how flexible REHAB’s basic architectural and technical configuration is. Today, the SAP ward appears as if it has always been there, fitting in seamlessly with the existing building.
The primary scope of the conversion is the creation of patient rooms with bathrooms, and associated functions such as a kitchen and recreation rooms. The inner courtyard is reduced by half to make room for a new therapy area. The garden, which is so important for the specific therapeutic concept of the SAP ward, is redesigned and supplemented with additional planting.
Before this conversion, the day clinic had to be relocated. For this purpose, an extension in lightweight timber construction was built on the roof in 2019, for which the structure was designed to cope in 2002. Four large day rooms are positioned next to one another, alongside a central spine of servicing functions such as changing rooms and offices. There are no corridors; every square meter is usable space. A covered veranda, with a view over a planted roof towards Alsace, extends the interior space. The roof over this new "house" was erected in a day like the roof of a hangar. The details are derived from the existing building, sothat only a very attentive visitor notices that something has been changed.