It is not often, according to HLM Architects, that that a hospital project is used as a catalyst for an area’s social regeneration. As the practice itself puts it: ‘Regeneration tends to rely on creating a sense of pride and local identity, qualities with which hospitals are rarely associated’.
However creating a design that engendered a real sense of community ownership, and that local people could be really proud of, was precisely the challenge that faced the architects on the Ysbyty Cwm Cynon hospital project in South Wales, as HEJ reports.
On one level, the brief for this £70 million facility for Cwm Taf Health Board (formerly Cwm Taf NHS Trust) was nothing out of the ordinary – the Health Board needed to replace the outdated NHS Mountain Ash and Aberdare hospitals with a centre that could provide more than 120 beds for rehabilitation and intermediate care, as well as women’s and children’s services, supporting therapies, a range of outpatient clinics, and a mental health unit. Therefore, it planned for, and has now had built (the building was completed in April this year by VINCI Construction UK), a new 18,000 m2 building with 128 rehabilitation and intermediate care beds, a full therapies department, a radiology department, outpatient clinics, a mental health unit and day facilities, children’s services, and, as a seamless inclusion to the original brief, an 18-chair community dental unit and training school to provide even more local, accessible services, to the community.
Former mining valley
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