In an attempt to set patients (and their parents) at ease, children’s hospitals are often bathed in vibrant hues and whimsical, storybook motifs. And while emerging research in neuroaesthetics demonstrates the psychological effects of colour on mood and well-being, there is no sugarcoating the reality of being, or having, a sick child. For families spending long days in healthcare settings, a taste of home is just what the doctor ordered. In designing Zurich’s new children’s hospital, Herzog & de Meuron has delivered just that.

Located in Zürich-Lengg, at the foot of a hill known as Burghölzli, the facility is sensitively integrated into the landscape. The hospital’s concave façade recedes to create a shared forecourt with the adjacent University Psychiatric Clinic, a historic building dating to 1869. The three-storey structure, constructed with a concrete frame and wooden infills, feels of a piece with its primarily residential context. “The curved, three-story main facade with its endearing small-scale wooden houses and variously sloped roofs offers a friendly and warm welcome to young patients and their families,” explains co-founder Pierre de Meuron.

To the north of the hospital, Herzog & de Meuron have also designed an associated teaching and research facility. The lab spaces are housed in a cylindrical white building in the middle of a fruit orchard, wrapped around a central sunlit atrium which can be transformed into an agora for special events; the lecture halls, meanwhile, are built into the natural slope of the terrain. The entire building has been designed to foster collaboration amongst researchers, who are hopefully making discoveries that can be put into action next door.

Focused on acute care, the hospital (which is the largest facility for children and adolescents in Switzerland) was designed to function like a miniature town with each department conceived as its own neighbourhood; the units are connected by a “main street” similar in scale to the Niederdorf main street in Zurich’s medieval old town. The architects opted for lightweight construction materials, excluding the concrete supports and circulation cores, allowing interior flexibility should departments need to increase or decrease in size.

Along the circulation route, patients will encounter several green courtyards that not only add a dose of daylight and biophilia but also help people orient themselves within the labyrinthine building. The landscapes (designed by August + Margrith Künzel and realized by Andreas Geser) include over 250 new trees and large, Ice Age-era boulders found underground during construction. In addition to the courtyards which bring the outside in, the architects have carried the natural feel into the interior with exposed wood finishes that lend the common spaces a sense of warmth.

While the lower levels consist of treatment areas, offices and a restaurant, inpatient rooms are located on the uppermost floor for privacy and quiet (patients can receive transdisciplinary treatment in four centres along the main street). Set back from the rest of the building, they introduce an entirely different architectural language and scale.

Designed like small wooden cottages, each of the 114 rooms has its own roof articulated on the exterior as staggered forms with varying inclinations, symbolizing that patients here aren’t just a number but are treated as individuals. Each room has a warm material palette, views to the outdoors, and a sofa bed for parents to spend the night — helping families stay together during uncertain times and offering a feeling of home away from home.

“Ironically, hospitals all over the world and even in Switzerland are often the ugliest places. Here at the Children’s Hospital, people can see for themselves how daylight coming in from outside and variations in proportion can animate and change a room, how plants and vegetation can blur the distinction between inside and outside and how materials are not just beautiful to look at but also pleasing to the touch,” explains co-founder Jacques Herzog. “We designed all these things with conscious intent so that people can perceive them, sense them and ultimately feel better. Architecture can contribute to healing.”