海角视频

Alder Hey Catkin House Community Cluster and Sunflower House

Liverpool, UK

海角视频 delivered multi-disciplinary engineering services for this innovative project, which provides a centre for excellence for children鈥檚 health within the grounds of the Alder Hey Children鈥檚 hospital in Liverpool.

A 鈥渙ne-stop-shop鈥� for a range of health services, including both physical and mental health aspects, the buildings have been designed to offer a calming environment for patients and staff alike, and include consulting and clinical rooms, offices and a separate building containing a set of residential wards for overnight or longer stays.

The children鈥檚 mental health inpatient unit is known as Sunflower House, and the 鈥榗ommunity cluster鈥�, which primarily offers outpatient facilities, is known as The Catkin Centre.

The name Sunflower House was put forward by children previously under the care of the Dewi Jones Unit, which was relocated to the new facility.

In honour of Dewi Jones, the pioneer and consultant in child and adolescent psychiatry who took a lead role in setting up and organising mental health services for young people in and around Liverpool, the gardens of Sunflower House are named the Dewi Jones Gardens.

The Catkin Centre gets its name from the seedpod of an Alder tree. Like Sunflower House, this represents new life and growth, in this case from the Alder tree, of course symbolic of Alder Hey.

The Catkin Centre provides an attractive and non-clinical feeling children鈥檚 outpatient space.

Sunflower House uses the calming aesthetics of exposed timber and biophilic planting to improve patient wellbeing.

Access to daylight also proved key to creating the calming ambience that the design team was aspiring towards.

We worked closely with Cullinan Studio architects on developing effective, collaborative solutions around the award-winning design.

Our experts helped to deliver an innovative, low-carbon design for both buildings, which included incorporating the natural topography and using cross-laminated timber slabs and walls.

Challenge

海角视频 was engaged by architects Cullinan Studio to provide a range of specialist engineering consultancy and advice through the competition, design and tendering stages of the development, after which delivery was handed on to the design and build contractor to take forward.

The hospital and architect鈥檚 vision involved the creation of a calm healing environment for both the new outpatient unit and the new children鈥檚 specialist mental health unit. These health and wellbeing aspirations formed a key part of the building鈥檚 design, with extensive use of timber and both internal and external planting to provide a biophilic environment with connection to a new park, excellent daylighting and natural ventilation.

While the use of exposed timber was central to the architect鈥檚 competition-winning design, it is a material that is unfamiliar in a clinical setting. The hospital authorities needed to be convinced of the benefits of using timber in this way, as well as the capacity for the material to be regularly cleaned to a clinical grade. Our experts therefore needed to support the design team in demonstrating that timber was an appropriate material for the facility and that the non-clinical feel of the environment could play a key role in the mental health recovery of the children using Sunflower House.

There was also a desire for the design to offer a low carbon structure, both in terms of operational sustainability, with low energy and cost-efficient building services, but also in terms of keeping the embodied carbon of the building to a minimum 鈥� the choice of lightweight materials and timber was key to achieving this within the budget of the project.

Solution

The centrepiece of the design for the Catkin Centre is a conical atrium, with the walls featuring a lattice of exposed structural timber and hanging plants, with daylight flooding in from roof lights. This combination is designed to create a calming and non-clinical feel to the entry and waiting space.

The buildings are constructed around steel frames with cross-laminated timber slabs and walls. As well as being aesthetically pleasing, the heavy use of timber has delivered the added benefit of reducing the embodied carbon footprint of the new buildings. But this is just one part of a design that is heavily focused on low carbon solutions, including carefully working with the existing topography to allow the removal of the standard concrete basement, so in effect the buildings are constructed on stilts within a natural depression.

The construction is formed above this with minimal structure and using lightweight materials wherever possible throughout the design. A solar PV array is incorporated into the design on the roof of the Catkin Centre, which further lowers its operational carbon footprint.

The design team was able to reassure the NHS that cross-laminated timber walls would prove suitable in terms of the infection control needs of a clinical setting. Our specialist acoustics and fire engineering teams also fed into the design, helping to realise a timber building in this unusual medical setting.

A campus energy approach integrates both buildings into sustainable air source heat pump sources, which will become increasingly carbon efficient as the grid decarbonises.

Value

Our multidisciplinary service has allowed us to integrate our engineering designs, offering efficiency gains to the client.

Our long history of working on complex engineering projects with multiple stakeholders, allowed us to support the wider design and build teams to fully engage with the variety of end user groups, with a number of departments from the hospital now using the space.

We also played a key role in the drive towards minimising the carbon footprint of the project, including introducing new materials to the traditionally conservative end-client, the NHS. We worked as part of a highly collaborative design team, helping to take the hospital on this journey of evolution.