University Hospital of Valladolid / Pardo Tapia Arquitectos + Salvador Mata

Curated by ArchDaily

Architects: Pardo Tapia Arquitectos, Salvador Mata
Area: 50000 m²
Year: 2014
Photographs:Jesús Granada
Construction: SACYR, RIOVENA, NUCLEO S.A.

Text description provided by the architects. The adopted solution starts from the determining presence of a preexistent building, marked by the hospitable architecture of the seventies: a great complex massively implanted with a monolithic scale, identified unequivocally as a typical sanitary endowment in the city. In spite of its " not nice " image, the building grants an architectural personality that needs to be valued.

This implantation also produces problems of continuity with the surrounding street network, as well as vicinity problems with other endowments or historical buildings as the Universitary ones.

University Hospital of Valladolid / Pardo Tapia Arquitectos + Salvador Mata - Image 17 of 26 — Site Plan

This situation repeats itself in the interior organization of the building, marked by successive small reforms that do not include the intentions and the global vision of a needed Master Plan.

Thus, the adopted solution raises the reform of the existing building and the extension of the same one by the construction of a series of low height buildings, placed on the available spaces in order to organize the functional plan and to compose a new architectural set joined with the city.

There is projected a fragmented architecture connected to the existing building by using galleries of parallel connection. Several volumes of four heights on low solve the traffic between the monolithic scale of the existing building to the urban scale of the new set.

These new buildings are articulated by several light courtyards, proposing a regular structure that allows future additions or extensions with maximum flexibility. Also the distribution of functional areas are arranged in the logic of growth and possible interconnections with new services.

The internal organization of the proposed hospital is based on the interrelationships between the different services. The vertical compatibility is based on communication cores (that we call "shuttles) departing from the level assigned to the new pedestrian stratum, and the horizontal compatibility is established following the continuity relations to the same level.

The new heights are integrated with the environment, reducing visual impacts and providing a new quality to the urban landscape. The old surface of the parking placed on the back of the hospital turns into a partially elevated square, providing a new front to the complex towards the street and solving the diverse accesses that a hospital needs. The link between the new square with the rest of the city is based on a geometrical topography system that receive some of these new accesses.