You are a major health organisation commissioning a new headquarters building. What image would you want it to project about your organisation and its values? Healthy must be a first priority. What else? Efficiency, caring, organised, and perhaps innovative thinking?
Bilbao is a city which has commissioned world-class architecture in Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, Norman Foster’s “Fosteritos” and, more recently, Phillipe Starck’s cultural centre. Sometimes things go awry. In a street of fairly traditional buildings, the new Health Building designed by COLL-BARREU ARQUITECTOS breaks many of the rules. The aim of the building was laudatory – to bring together all the staff and facilities of the Basque Health Department headquarters into one location - rather than being spread across several buildings with inconvenience for staff and users, with resulting organizational and property benefits. The second aim was to give the Basque Health Services an identity – the contrast between the cool, well-designed, organised interiors and the dislocated folded façade is not exactly helpful in that respect.
The site is located at an important junction of the Ensanche and had to respond to planning guidelines aimed to achieve some consistency of urban planning which the building does in a different and modern way. The basic building is quite simple and the folded glass outer façade enables a sustainable building solution with spatial benefits within the floorplates. It certainly makes a statement but is this really the best image to project about health services in the Basque Region? Futuristic perhaps; the inside is efficient, calm, light, transparent and spacious; but the outside is free-flowing, lively and chaotic and, although it reflects the buildings around it, visually looks like a building which has been taken over by an alien organism. This is a building with a split personality; a strange image for a health service organization. It will also be interesting to see what the life of the façade is and how things are in 30 years time.
Interior pictures from e-architect.
