UCLH proton beam hospital was hit by technical glitches and hold-ups caused by pandemic
Scott Tallon Walker and Edward Williams Architects’ £380m cancer hospital in central London has finally completed, more than two years after it was supposed to open.
布卢姆斯伯里项目是由布伊格英国公司为伦敦大学学院医院NHS基金会信托建造的，承包商于2015年9月赢得了当时1.9亿英镑的合同。该单元原定于2019年开放，但由于延误，完工日期被推迟到明年夏天。2019冠状病毒病大流行的影响造成了进一步的延误。
Thearchitects were appointed in 2014. When Building Design’s sister title Building firstrevealed the project was running behind schedule, no reason for the delay was given but a UCLH spokesperson said at the time: “The construction project is exceptionally challenging. For example, we have recently completed one of the largest excavations in London.”
It includes a five-storey, 28m-deep basement – equivalent in volume to the Royal Albert Hall.
The facility will offer proton beam therapy, an advanced type of radiotherapy which can be targeted so precisely that cancer cells can be destroyed without the collateral damage caused by conventional radiotherapy.
It is only the second of its type in the UK, the other being at the Christie Hospital in Manchester. The London facility will be able to treat 650 people with cancer and benign tumours each year, around a third of whom will be children and teenagers.
The 13-storey building also includes eight operating theatres, a surgical recovery area, a surgical ward, an imaging centre, a 10-bed critical care unit and three floors of inpatient haematology wards.
它位于托特纳姆法院路和格拉夫顿路的拐角处，球队必须保持畅通，以便救护车通过格拉夫顿路的道路到达UCLH的主要建筑。
The 34,600sq m facility has been built in the Bloomsbury conservation area and is close to two grade II-listed UCL buildings as well as the Northern and Victorian tube lines which serve nearby Warren Street station. It is also directly beneath a protected viewing corridor.
These constraints necessitated a five-storey basement plus mezzanine, with seven floors above ground, reaching a height of 57m. In its entirety the building is the same height as Tower Bridge.
The design is intended to reduce patient stress, with space, direct visual access to natural daylight, natural materials and sensory encounters to offer respite from the traffic-clogged roads just outside. A series of planted terraces is intended to provide peaceful settings for recuperation.
The building, which restores a derelict site to the city grid, is stepped back across its section and split into two corresponding blocks connected by an atrium designed to bring natural daylight right through the building and into all inpatient rooms, something that is particularly important to the hospital’s long-term patients.
To allow a degree of openness to the outside world for the patient, a “veil” has been added to the façade which also provides solar shading.
The architects said they chose the material palette to complement the Portland stone cladding of neighbouring buildings.
Scott Tallon Walker建筑事务所主任希拉·卡尼(Sheila Carney)说:“疫情进一步强调了在现代环境中为患者提供优质医疗保健的重要性，该环境旨在造福所有用户的福祉，并促进康复时间。”设计遵循直接的自然光线、自然和景观的视觉访问原则，并最大限度地使用自然材料和调色板。”
Edward Williams, founder of Edward Williams Architects and ex-Hopkins partner, said: “From my previous experience designing the Macmillan Cancer centre for UCLH it was clear that site value maximisation would be crucial on this project, in a constrained site with height restrictions from the St Paul’s View Corridor. We managed to arrange most plant and functions that did not require daylight below ground level, as well as healing the urban block and achieving an integrated design with the existing residential accommodation and internal planted roofs.”
>> From the archive: Edward Williams:How leaving Hopkins was the best risk I ever took
Others to work on it include project manager Aecom, civil and structural engineer Campbell Reith and M&E consultant WSP. The client’s advisors included BDP, Arup, Curtins, T&T and Ridge.
At peak, 3,000 people were working on the job with 44,000 cu m of concrete poured to form walls typically two metres thick around the equipment needed for the cancer treatment, with some areas of the concrete around five metres thick.
In all, 80,000 cu m of earth was removed from the site with 8,000 tonnes of steel required.
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