Customer: Hospital de Viladecans (Institut Català de la Salut - ICS)
Architect partner: Circalle
Year: 2024
Location: Viladecans, Barcelona, Spain
Viladecans Hospital is located in one of the Barcelona metropolitan area's fastest-growing districts, and its infrastructure has expanded accordingly since 2019. As part of a five-year expansion and reform programme, Viladecans Hospital opened new facilities in June 2024. The new facilities were designed with a clear brief from the ICSVerds Environment team. The space should be welcoming for patients while being able to adapt to the changing needs of the hospital.
The seating is distributed throughout the hospital's waiting areas. These areas are defined by patients and visitors under stress or uncertainty. The solution prioritises accessibility throughout: raised seat heights and integrated armrests allow people to sit and stand without assistance.
The modular design provides the possibility for the wards to expand as patient volumes shift, or spatial layouts change with future phases of the hospital's development. The seating reconfigures rather than gets replaced. New modules connect to existing ones, and the installation grows with the building rather than becoming obsolete within it.
A hospital waiting room asks a great deal of the people in it. Wood does not resolve that, but it changes the register of the room. The warmth of a natural material introduces a quality that hard clinical surfaces do not carry. The wait does not shorten, but the room becomes easier to be in.
The new facilities opened in 2024 with seating designed to serve a broad range of patients across the hospital's expanded footprint. The modular configuration positions the solution to adapt to future changes in layout or capacity.