Location: Birtinya, Australia.

Architect: HDR inc..

The Sunshine Coast University Hospital (SCUH) is one of the largest Greenfield hospital developments in Australia, designed collaboratively by HDR and Architectus for the Exemplar Health consortium. The 160,000 square metre SCUH is Queensland’s first PPP hospital and offers a wide range of tertiary level healthcare facilities, including an emergency department, comprehensive cancer centre, specialised medical and surgical services, maternity service, rehabilitation service, mental health unit, renal service, and interventional and diagnostic services. The SCUH is located on Lake Kawana, 2 kilometres inland from the beach at the geographic centre of the coastal city. The Kawana Town Centre and future rail station to the north of the Hospital are yet to be built, rendering the form and detail of SCUH critical in establishing the urban character of its surrounding precinct. The site is bounded by bushland to the west and medium to low density residential to the east. The SCUH aspiration is to provide excellent care through collaboration, enquiry and education. SCUH is a teaching hospital providing a comprehensive range of tertiary services to admitted patients and outpatients for adults and children as well as education and research. The SCUH is contextually responsive, capturing the qualities of its locale’s culture, climate, lush vegetation, sweeping views, vernacular character, materials, colour and light, translating these into a benign environment ideal for healing and comfort. Using a human scale and responding appropriately to the context with a refined palette of materials, colours and screening elements this large and complex facility is grounded in its physical and cultural setting. The Outdoor Room, shared by the Hospital and its neighbouring Sunshine Coast Health Institute acts as a gathering space at the convergence of transport, cycling and pedestrian routes. This semi-enclosed space is covered with hovering timber battens and fritted glass, providing both shelter and filtered shade to link the Hub and its activities to the entry portico of the hospital. This dignified yet informal space mediates between the intimate scale of the public circulation space and the larger scale of the hospital complex providing a memorable meeting and orientation place for the hospital and a significant civic space for the wider community. The SCUH shifts the paradigm of a major hospital from a complex for doctors and nurses where patients were treated as ‘cases,’ to that of a city where the patient is the citizen – with rooms, not wards, allowing family to be there and allowing for seamless teaching and learning.

Photo credit: Brett Boardman.