Mayo Building, a new £20 million state-of-the-art education centre, has officially opened at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust.
Designed by HKS, the 10, 000 sq m building has been delivered through PFI as part of an extensive restructuring of the Salford Royal site, and provides educational and clinical training facilities for staff, as well as some clinical support services including mortuary and aseptic services.
The new building which features distinctive blue and grey cladding panels on the north elevation, is designed to provide an important new focus on the existing hospital site, and replaces an existing patients and visitors’ car park which is to be relocated elsewhere on site.
The block will also serve an important role in creating a cohesive healthcare campus, with its distinctive yellow rendered stair and lift core serving as a wayfinding marker for the public to guide them onto and through the site.
Levels 1 and 2 of Mayo Building house the educational facilities, which provide library, lecture theatres, seminar rooms, mock patient bedrooms, resuscitation and manual handling training rooms, skills laboratories and simulation rooms, while level 3 is dedicated to office space. Level 0 houses the back-of-house clinical departments, including the aseptic suite, decontamination unit, linen and mortuary. These are connected to the main hospital by underground tunnels to facilitate discrete staff access and ensure that these departments are accessed away from public routes.
Project architect Paul Strudwick comments, “We have worked closely with Balfour Beatty and Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust to achieve a high quality design, which is made prominent by the carefully articulated panelised facade.
“Visually, Mayo Building is divided into three distinct vertical elements, with the distinctive cladding treatment on the northern elevation providing a striking backdrop to the public square. Level 0, meanwhile, is treated as the ‘plinth’ of the sculptural form, with the single colour rain screen cladding representing a heavy stone base. Finally, the east, west and south elevations use a simple horizontal language, which wraps around the plane of the north elevation.
“The entire project was delivered on time and within budget, and we feel contributes an engaging new visual dynamic on the existing hospital site.”
HKS has also designed and delivered a Multi storey car park (MSCP) at the southern end of the hospital site, which uses architectural language inspired by 1930’s themes of a motorcar’s form, with bull-nosed white concrete fins wrapping around the westerly, southerly and easterly faces of the building. The MSCP also acts as a backdrop - and a buffer - between the new Mayo Building and the motorway.
HKS was appointed by contractor Balfour Beatty to project manage the delivery of architectural design services on Mayo Building, which handed over in two stages, and forms the third of nine phases of the entire PFI redevelopment project at Salford.
