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.

LLF is a compact stand-alone building with a floor area of 16,700 m², in which rooms for university teaching and research, as well as clinical diagnostics laboratories, are stacked on top of each other: lecture halls, seminar rooms, a study centre and laboratories. Beneath this cylindrical building, there are a lecture hall and two seminar rooms, which movable partition walls enable to be joined together as one large room for up to 1,200 people. A large round opening connects this room with the open-plan student work areas, media centre and classrooms that are all situated above it. On the five upper floors, laboratories and offices are arranged along the facade in closed rooms, while open-plan work areas for doctoral students and laboratory staff surround the central atrium.

LLF’s load-bearing structure consists of a reinforced-concrete skeleton with flat slabs, resting on columns and load-bearing walls in the core areas (lift and building-services shafts). Round prefabricated columns of spun concrete with a diameter of 35 cm (40 cm on the underground floors) are provided in the interior. In the facade layer, steel columns are planned (S355 rolled-steel sections). The seamless balconies, made of reinforced concrete, rest on rigid projecting steel beams that join onto the facade columns. In order to minimise secondary bending of the balcony, plain bearings are positioned between the steel beams and the balcony slab.