BASSANO HOSPITAL

The project deals with an area of 240'000 m²: the main building hosts up to 795 beds and 42 technical ones, it comprehends all the general services to which relate other minor buildings like offices, nurse training facilities, crew spaces and the morgue.

The overall volume of the hospital is 356'728 m³ and it spreads over an area of 76'253 m².

The main building has three underground floors within which are located the general services, the archives, the conference room, the bulk storage, the kitchen (able to serve 2'300 meals a day), the restaurant for the crew. Then there are two more floors dedicated to diagnosis and therapy. The following floor hosts 10 operating rooms. Then there are nine more floors for hospitalisation interposed by two technical floors.

The project’s guiding concepts are based on the definition of well calibrated environments, on the distribution of functional spaces closely depending on their degree of operative connection and above all on the maximum reduction of routes.

From this an articulated monobloc is born although there is a marked difference between services and wards.
Generally speaking the wards start after the 3rd floor above ground level, in a 12-storey tower; the 3rd floor is used for utilities.

The tower is a quintuple block that accommodates, around its perimeter, four ward units with 24 beds each - which are in turn divided into 12-bed subunits - with all the services in its centre.

This type of construction, quite popular in Europe, minimizes operating distances but demands the total air conditioning of the premises and, in the centre, also continuous artificial lighting.

There are large living rooms on the two short sides of each floor in the tower, totally glazed and each with a large terrace giving on to an open staircase linking the different floors down to the ground floor. These rooms are useful for the wards but more than anything else they are an excellent “parking” area for escape in the event of fire. For this reason the division between living rooms and wards is made in fire resistant panels and glazing (Rei 120). On the 2nd floor under the tower, the construction extends orthogonally towards the wards and this larger surface accommodates the operating service with 10 theatres, reanimation with 8 beds for intensive care and 6 beds for subintensive care, the coronary unit with 8 beds, the anaesthesiology department, haemodialysis with 14 beds and a further 30 beds of which 20 for cardiology and 10 for nephrology. The outpatients’ departments, analysis laboratory, health management offices and some general services are all grouped together on the 1st floor.

The emergency ward with reception, diagnosis and treatment services, hygiene and sanitary organisation services, physiotherapy, the blood transfusion centre and radiology are all located on the ground floor. A large entrance hall, with the main services for patients and visitors facing it, completes the floor’s configuration.

The pathological anatomy laboratories, general services, supply office, kitchen, central sterilization department, pharmacy, storage, archives and a large Congress Centre are all located in the first basement.

Staff locker rooms, technical substations, disinfection, bed washing room and all the other sanitary, technical and supply services are located in the second and third basements.

The overal project for the building complex is based on a modular lattice with an 8 m square grid. The actual guiding concept, regarding the choice of structures, was the implementation of industrialized type construction elements, continuously repeated, that would speed work with the aid of just a few tools that could be used repeatedly. Construction systems based on the prefabrication of structural elements were also looked into but it was preferred to make the structural elements on site, standardized and repeated.

The building structure consists of a set of pillars positioned at the vertexes of the 8x8 m lattice, supporting continuous horizontal plates mades in concrete and brick with a constant thickness of 45 cm. Pillar cross-section is identical for each building and on each floor, more precisely, a regular octagon circumscribed by a 64 cm diameter circle. Metal forms that are quick to assemble and disassemble are used for this method and they can be used repeatedly and quickly.

It is only the steel reinforcement of the various pillars that differs in that, in the case of maximum perpendicular stress, the steel reinforcement has been replaced by steel sections embedded in concrete.
The horizontal building system used, based on a constant grid, has certain construction advantages.
The advantages of this method are obvious: the complete lack of obstacles to hinder the numerous ceiling mounted ducts on each floor, the ease and static safety with which it is possible to implement the horizontal crossovers for the systems (of particular importance for hospital constructions).

It’s a different matter for the main hospital block where the 13 floors of wards are. Although the same guiding concepts do apply to it, some alterations are necessary to achieve maximum functional exploitation of the wards.
For the lower floors (up to the 2nd above the ground) the same lattice grid structure will be more or less maintained while from the 4th floor up, the structure will be staggered vertically along the front for a more rational spacing of the wards.

As far as engineering is concerned, initially and relating to the continuous upgradings, its point of reference is the quality of the environment and energy saving.
The whole hospital complex has modern air conditioning systems for winter and summer able to follow and adapt to the thermal load of each room and to maintain each room constantly “washed” with filtered air.
The same applies to the lighting system which has been resolved by using special bulbs with heat temperatures comparable to those of natural light.
Bassano hospital stands out among the Italian hospitals for the completeness of its engineering technology.

Starting from the presence of a highly advanced congeneration station for the combined production of thermal energy and electricity, the hospital is also using automatic, monorail light transportation means, a pneumatic transportation system for the disposal of waste and one for dirty linen, an indoor communication system, fire detection systems and entry monitoring systems: all this is controlled by an advanced control centre.
A LAN network guarantees internal exchange between each department and between the hospital and the outside.

Project research on the technological plane is underlined by the lack of heavy transportation systems, quite frequent in modern European hospitals of the same size. In fact they would be superfluous because of the excellent “compact” layout of the services-block around the main vertical traffic node in the centre of the tower-block.
All the supply services, with the end zones of their production cycle, lead to this node; in this way the maximum horizontal route of the finished product, from any source, that is distributed to the departments is limited to inside each single department.
 

Bassano hospital is characterized by its vertical layout.
This characteristic, undoubtedly advantageous as far as “functionality” goes, clashes with the hospital’s chance of expanding itself in the future.
If all this is true for the area set aside for the wards (also defined as a “permanent area”) it is not so for the services block where we find guiding lines on the basis of homogeneous functional systems such as diagnostics, laboratory research and rehabilitation, or to make it possible to have new wards or new services.
 

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