Brunet Saunier Architecture — Phylum H — La Galerie d’Architecture — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 17 → April 14, 2018

The hospital, from its Latin root hospitalis, is a haven for the needy, the traveler, and the ill. It is a place of welcome and care for one and all, free of charge and regardless of social rank or origin. So defined, a hospital is a sort of shelter centered round people and their needs. But today’s hospitals are also prodigious clusters of technology, places of knowledge, technical prowess and expertise; insatiable and incessant machines with seemingly unlimited capabilities. Here in lies the main challenge for the architect: to combine home and infrastructure under one roof; to reconcile the immanent and complex technology with the comfort of patients, their families and the medical staff.

About twenty years of hospital design led Brunet Saunier Architecture to acquire an extensive expertise in this field and develop a unique perspective, both aesthetic and scientific, on changes in healthcare culture and practice. With the architect Gerold Zimmerli, hospital consultant, the firm has developed a unique and minimalist style, combining an abstraction of forms with an extreme flexibility in order to maximize a building’s capacity to evolve. Only by fully embracing the machine in all its forms can the hospital be accessible, caring and generous. Thus unfettered by technical constraints, the architect is free to express a building’s spatial qualities, views, light, materials and relations with the exterior.

The Phylum H exhibition applies scientific principles, just like those used in entomology, to explore the phylogeny of the hospital edifice. Drawing on the components of about a hundred of the office’s projects, the analysis focuses on five of these buildings in Europe. Directed by Richard Copans, a Virtual Reality (VR) tour of the Nord Franche-Comté Hospital adds a further dimension to the study, transporting the visitor into the heart of a project that blends poetry with rationality.

The machine as an organism dedicated to people.