Playing with Materials

Glimpsed quickly by drivers on the external boulevard or approached more slowly from the other streets around it, the new Technical Support Center of the Strasbourg Hospital adapts its façades to the rhythms and decor of the city. 

 Facing south, the main façade is in harmony with the urban scale and accompanies the drive up Quai Pasteur to the bridge across the canal. Largely glazed, this façade benefits from a sun screen made of airy and transparent "caravel sails" that maintains its architectural unity and lightens the mass of the building. The half-open aluminum slats are parted at eye level to frame the view of the canal; they borrow from the new Civil Hospital opposite, the metal used by Claude Vasconi.

As another echo from its context, sandstone from the Vosges mountains clothes the most intimate façade of the block, continuing the line of the bacteriology building overlooking the east road.

Although compact by functional necessity, the new Microbiology Technical Support Center adapts to the evolution of research techniques thanks to its internal flexibility.

Traffic flows around a vertical distribution located in the service core at the center of the unit. The architect draws natural light in everywhere, all the way to the heart of the building, where it plunges from a light well into the wave of a blue stairway.

"Atypical, the meeting of materials occurs at the corner of the building and continues with the cladding on the east, west and north façades of the ground floor in shades of medium gray."