The Helsinki Trauma and Cancer Center offers a new western façade to the HUS (Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa) Meilahti Campus/ Located north of downtown Helsinki, it sits on the edge of Seurasaarenselkä Bay and faces the magnificent granite and seascape of the Gulf of Finland on one side and the main campus square on the other.

As the Trauma Center in Töölö has not been adapted to current care practices for a decade, HUS decided in 2010 to build a new Trauma Center on the HUS Meilahti hospital site as an extension of the Meilahti hospital tower, and as a complement to the Comprehensive Cancer Center in Helsinki. The reflection on the site officially began  in 2012 with the competition for the master plan and continued in 2014 with the consultation of users for drafting the program of what will become the new Trauma & Cancer Center. An architectural competition was launched in early 2015 with the objective of getting this new hospital off the ground as quickly as possible.  Brunet Saunier Architecture office joined forces with the Finnish architects AW2 Architects, B & M Architects and Harris – Kjisik for the occasion. Together they form the Team Integrated Silta Consortium.

Their proposal is designated winner later in 2015 and studies started rapidly the same year..
In order to further accelerate the design process and control the schedule, the general contractor was selected in the APS phase by a jury composed of the client, the BET (selected separately from the architectural consortium) and the architectural consortium on the basis of a pre-determined construction cost. The overlapping of the studies and the construction thus made it possible to complete this 71,000 m2 building in less than 8 years, despite the hard Finish winter climatic conditions,

The Helsinki Trauma and Cancer Center links the existing and newly created emergency and cancer departments on the Meilahti campus, creating a large, unified hospital facility designed to enhance the hospital’s operational efficiency and facilitate the flow of patients, staff and students. It houses an emergency department, operating rooms, a 58-bed intensive care unit, organ transplantation and plastic surgery services, the outpatient trauma department, several residential units including 215 beds and 180 day care spaces, an oncology department with radiology, conference rooms, a staff cafeteria, and support services for patients and their families.

Team Integrated’s proposal skilfully exploits the triangular shape of the plot to give unity to the polymorphous built ensemble of the university campus. On the campus side, its different volumes frame the main square of the hospital site and animate it with its glass and aluminum facades. On the Seurasaarenselkä bay side, they offer a foreground to the existing buildings of Meilahti and accompany the Paciuksenkatu street, an important axis of the city, until the end of the hospital site. The punctual emergences of the proposal, reaching up to 9 floors, assume the role of volumetric transition between the 15-storey hospital tower nicknamed the “Hilton Tower” located behind the Cancer & Trauma Center, the existing 10-storey cancer building and the flat surface of the Gulf of Finland.

Another significant aspect of the proposal is the flexibility of its spatial concept. The unique structural grid of 8.4 x 8.4 x 4.8 m allows a great freedom in the programming and layout of the floors, also in the superposition of functions. These dimensions also offer generous spaces both in terms of circulation, with corridors 2.9 m wide, and for the bedrooms, whose average surface area is 27 m2 (for a single bedroom). The meeting between this regular and generic grid and the singular triangular geometry of the hospital site generates numerous spaces of dilation in the network of circulations which can be used as waiting, resting or meeting spaces.

The project designed by Team Integrated links all the components of the Meilahti hospital site and its environment – sea, granite rocks, underground tunnels and existing buildings, campus roads etc… It is mainly composed of two buildings linked by a single amphitheater-shaped bridge. Not included in the initial program, this element is an iconic specificity of the project, which even gave it its name, SILTASAIRAALA, the “bridge hospital” in Finnish.
On the street side, adjacent to the Meilahti hospital tower, the building consists of a two-storey plinth housing the new Trauma Center technical platform, which is a direct extension of the existing technical platform. From this socle emerge three volumes, two of them host the doctors’ offices and the consultation areas. The third and highest one houses the accommodation units as well as classrooms and conference rooms for HUS students.
The technical spaces of the Siltasairaala are positioned on the attic of each of these emergences. This crowning touch, borrowed from a classical architectural style, covers with nobility a program that is both technical and essential to the life of a city.

Three atriums carved into the highest and most massive volumes allow light to penetrate all the way down to the first floor. In the medical oncology department, the first atrium spreads diffused light throughout the circulation spaces and serves as a vertical circulation space, while the second atrium forms the main entrance hall of the Trauma Center.  These high atriums illuminate some of the bedrooms, rest and waiting areas, as well as rooms for the nursing staff. Connected to each other, they form a vast network of covered and heated public spaces within the hospital. They allow visitors and patients to easily find their way around by facilitating views into the depths and by marking spaces with their geometric uniqueness.

A composite system of steel and concrete columns, supported by steel delta beams and concrete pre-slabs, was used to overcome the climatic constraints of the region during winter time.

On the Seurasaarenselkä bay side, the facades of the plinth form a series of recesses reminiscent of the play of solids and voids characteristic of Finnish architect Juha Leiviskä. This disposition avoids an overly frontal relationship with Paciuksenkatu street while opening up wide views to the sea. On the upper levels, the facades present an alternation of print-screened glass and folded aluminum sheets, The print-screen glass pattern were designed by the artist Sari Palosaari and entitled “Huokoinen raja” (a porous border). It was the first completed part of the hospital’s extensive art program, which was themed around the living environment of downtown Helsinki. The partially translucent texture is inspired by the surface of the water, referring to the sea shore that borders the Helsinki skyline.

The main atrium is distinguished in the façade by the absence of the aluminum grid structure. This large glass panel signals the entrance and dialogues with the glass panel facades of the pre-existing hospital.

All the corridors open onto the facade and benefit from natural light. The omnipresence of wood, on the doors, ceilings and walls, creates a warm and welcoming environment, conducive to care, both neutral and refined.

The inhabited footbridge crosses a pathway that innervates the center of the campus and connects the Cancer Center to the Trauma Center. With an amphitheater, it establishes a two-level connection allowing students, patients and staff to move easily from one department to the other. Positioned above the urban space, it provides a view of both the campus square and the landscape of the Gulf of Finland. 

Operating rooms are arranged around a sterile area in clusters of 6. Patient access is done on the opposite side to that of the operating staff and sterile material. In Finland, where the conception of hygiene differs culturally from the French conception for instance, the operating room is considered as a half-sterile and half-dirty zone. Patients are brought to the OR on their beds directly from their bedrooms. The resuscitation rooms are delimited by sliding glass walls, allowing greater control by the nursing staff.
In the day hospital, alcoves in the form of cells covered with wood at the bottom and topped with glass create cocoons in which patients can receive their treatment. These open cells are supervised by the nurse from a wooden partitioned cell. Their disposition allows great views toward the outside and the possibility to get privacy by closing curtains while being taken care of.

The bedrooms are arranged all around the highest emergence of the Trauma Center. They all have a large glass surface of 5.7 m2 which corresponds to 21% of their floor area. The windows are composed of a wooden fixed frame and a comfort sash allowing natural ventilation of the room. Their window sills are low so that the patient can enjoy the view to the outside from his bed. A blackout blind is positioned between the interior and exterior windows. The comfort of the patient is thus reinforced and the energy performance of the building improved.

The bedroom layout follows the principle of the diagonal view. The caregiver can see the patient directly from the entrance or even from the corridor without having to enter the room.

Already during the competition, all the members of the Integrated Team, such as architects and technical studies offices, worked on a common BIM model, allowing them to set up an efficient collaboration despite the distance between France and Finland.

This collaborative work was extended to all actors of the project and went on during the whole design process and construction phases. Very early on, a “Big Room” comprising workrooms, meeting rooms and an immersive cave was installed within the hospital campus in order to bring together in the same place, up to 3 days a week, HUS team members, technicians and designers, general contractor and future users (nursing and administrative staff). The immersive cave or virtual reality immersion system also made it possible to involve these users from the very first phases of the project and to work on the micro-implementation of medical and technical installations based on their real-life experience. In addition to this virtual setting, life-size mock-ups of certain essential rooms (operating room, consultation room, care station, etc.) helped designers and future users to better understand the real spatial conditions of the spaces that would soon become their workplace.

The Big Room, supported by digital and physical models, thus made it possible to address all the subjects by all the actors and staff concerned, and those even when part of the construction work had already begun, considerably reducing the technical and technological gap between the time of design and that of operation. This global system also allowed the designers to collect the knowledge of future users and to use it to design and build an efficient Trauma & Cancer Center, welcoming and best fitting within the HUS Meilahti campus and the surrounding landscapes.

– Antoine Kersse