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Photographs:Tom Arban
Text description provided by the architects. Bridgepoint Active Healthcare in Toronto is the largest facility of its kind in Canada focused on the treatment of complex chronic disease and rehabilitation. Bridgepoint’s leaders envisioned a new way of delivering healthcare in a new kind of hospital: a civic building - an urban centre - in which healthcare and community come together. The intent is to blur the traditional distinction of institutional space and public access and to provide an inspirational setting to assist patients in their recovery.
The design response recognizes the role landscape, nature and community play in supporting health. It optimizes the therapeutic benefits of natural light, access to nature, and views of the surrounding park and city skyline to ensure patients and staff feel constantly connected to the world outside. With an average patient stay of three months, there was strong impetus to create an environment that facilitates recovery and wellness.
The distinctive building envelope contains a fenestration pattern of 492 projecting ‘pop-out’ vertical frames – one for every patient bed – interspersed with the predominant horizontal fenestration as counterpoint. The massing rests on a concrete flat slab structure with cantilever floor plates around the perimeter.
To mitigate the scale of this facility, a vertical campus concept was conceived to create a community of stacked neighborhoods of patient units. Each floor is clearly ordered and organized into two neighborhoods of 32 beds each configured with single and double-bed patient rooms. Shared therapy space is centralized on each floor at the cores with common spaces to the north and south. Nursing stations are in close proximity to their respective neighborhoods of care.
The adjacent Don Jail (1864) has been restored and repurposed as the hospital administrative building. A series of jail cells, the gallows and the soaring rotunda have been preserved and are on view to the public for the first time with interpretive exhibits about what was North America’s largest reform facility. A dynamic contrast is established between the restored masonry of the Don Jail and the contemporary materiality of the new Bridgepoint.
The new hospital building re-casts itself as an iconic landmark in order to connect the entire precinct with the community and the city at large. Socialization is an important part of therapy, and the building offers many gathering spaces for patients, staff and the community, including a large ground floor terrace with a cafeteria, a therapy pool with picture windows onto the park, an expansive green roof terrace and park trail extensions through the hospital campus. A meditative labyrinth with a pattern of one at Chartres Cathedral in France is located on the main floor facing the park.
This LEED Silver certified facility presents a healing environment that is communal and accessible and supports wellness and recovery. The choice and variety of materials convey this objective. Architectural details, textures and finishes de-emphasize the feeling of being in an institution and instead offer comfort and provide an appropriate human scale and a feeling of intimacy.
