Atrium and artwork appeal to the heart

Lead architect at CODA Architects Craig Bennett told Jonathan Baillie the “excellent spirit of collaboration” throughout the facility’s design and construction was a major contributor to its completion on time and on budget.

The striking five-storey, 12,000 m2 BHI was designed by Bristol-based CODA Architects in a ProCure21 project in which the other project partners included main contractor Laing O’Rourke, M&E contractor Haden Young, consulting engineers Hoare Lea, structural engineer Aecom, and Trust project manager and cost consultant Gardiner & Theobald. The £61 million BHI building was constructed for University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust to bring together for the first time all the Trust’s cardiac services in one place. In the Trust’s words, “the BHI offers the very best in cardiac services to patients from Bristol, the South West and beyond”. As a research partnership between the University of Bristol and UH Bristol, the BHI is also an internationally recognised centre of excellence for cardiovascular research, which has attracted over £50 m of research funding since 1995. The quality of the building’s design and construction has recently been recognised with its shortlisting for three awards – Best Hospital Design, Best Interior Design, and Best Use of Visual Art in Healthcare – at the 2009 Better Healthcare Building Awards (due to be presented this month in London). It is built into a hillside at the northern end of the Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI) site, with the residential area of Kingsdown just to the north. While the location and its confined perimeter provided a number of significant challenges for main contractor Laing O’Rourke, the sloping site had the advantage of enabling the incorporation of entrance points on four separate levels, including a service road which runs into a delivery tunnel that had to be carved into the rock, on level 4.

 A regional review