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Hospitalet redesignet

Rory Coonan starts by stating: Predictions are useless. Once you have realised the future, it is already obsolete. He has been in the design team creating the hospital of the future: with no signs, corridors or office spaces for doctors (he adds: remember to put names outside of offices, if you want your employees to use it. Offices are used 30 pct. more, if there's a name on the door). He figures: If you give people what they want, they already have it. So it is better to come up with something new..

The hospital CircleBath in question, is a look at the future of health care. The challenge was to reinvent medical design, not only as a technology, but also an environment - to put hospitality back into hospital. .

Instead of following design tradition, Rory Coonan decided to gather of team without prior experience of designing a hospital. A blank slate. Their assignment was to design a space for healing and caring, a task that proved difficult given all the regulations in the area. The results was a hospital that doesn't even feel like a hospital..

When patients enter the premises, they are awed. They describe it like a hotel or gallery. The latter isn't too far from the truth; the art hanging on the walls of CircleBath is even for sale. The building doesn't have the stressed, sterile feeling of ordinary hospital..

Its spaces are filled with natural light and an air of calmness, a deliberate design decision in order to shorten the patients' healing time in the hospital. After all, Rory Coonan point out, hospitals are dangerous places to be. .

CircleBath is welcoming the future in more than one way: Circle Health, the company behind CircleBath, is not a monolithic concern. 45 pct. of the CircleBath is owned by the very people working in the hospital - doctors, nurses and so on. The line of thinking is that the employees will feel more connected to the hospital, if they own part of it themselves. The venture model is new way to think of businesses..
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