Hospitals aren’t meant to be pretty. Or friendly. Or warm. But Zurich’s new Kinderspital – designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron – is all three, and then some more. It’s an ambitious attempt to prove what should already be obvious: that healthcare architecture can heal, not just house.
Built over 14 years, the project replaces Switzerland’s largest children’s hospital with a sprawling, low-rise complex on a leafy Zurich hillside. It doesn’t try to disguise itself as a hotel, like some private clinics. But it does borrow something from the spa: light, peace, and a quiet respect for the human body.
Inside, the building feels more like a town than a ward. The architects scrapped the usual stacked floorplan in favour of three broad, horizontal levels organized around a central “main street”, dotted with 16 landscaped courtyards. Departments become neighbourhoods. Patient rooms – each one a little pitched-roof “cottage” – look and feel like private cabins in a mountain retreat. Warm wood floors and soft daylight replace the harsh flatness of traditional vinyl and fluorescent tubes.
But the most radical thing about the new Kinderspital is also the simplest: it’s designed around the needs of the people who actually use it. Children enter through oversized cartoon gates. Corridors are wide enough for football. There are portholes at child height, beds that become sofas for overnighting parents, and walls you’re allowed to draw on. Not in spite of the medical function, but in service of it.
This sensitivity extends to the staff, too. The building is designed with the same care for flow and flexibility as it is for feelings. The concrete frame allows partitions to be moved and departments to expand as needs change. Stairs and windows act as landmarks, making wayfinding intuitive. And wherever you are, you can usually see a tree.
There’s something distinctly Swiss about this approach – a rare blend of wealth, order and design finesse. Even more than that, it’s part of a longer Swiss tradition of rethinking the relationship between environment and health. From revolutionary Alpine communes to the still-influential ideas of Swiss psychiatrists like Bleuler and Jung, there’s long been a belief here that surroundings matter. Herzog & de Meuron, Basel natives and global architecture icons, have spent the last two decades quietly applying this idea to healthcare. Kinderspital is their most ambitious effort yet: a place where design isn’t just decoration, but care. The result is a hospital that feels less like a machine, and more like a community. One where healing doesn’t begin at the bedside, but at the front door.