INTERNATIONAL STORIES
BUILDING BETTER TO ELICIT MORE VALUE FOR MONEY Martina Cardi Bryden Wood
Bryden Wood architect Martina Cardi explains how it helped deliver a cutting-edge, best-inclass hospital in the UK that cost 30 per cent less to build than comparable facilities. Along with reducing cost, Bryden Wood’s work on Circle Birmingham Hospital focused on sustainability, reducing carbon in both construction and operation, as well as designing in flexibility for future developments – both known and unknown.
Bryden Wood are the architects and engineers of a new facility in Edgbaston, a suburb of Birmingham in the English Midlands in the United Kingdom. The purpose of the Circle Birmingham Hospital project was to deliver a new, best-in-class hospital – England’s largest bespoke rehabilitation hospital. Its aim is to combine outstanding clinical outcomes and patient safety, with an excellent experience for patients, staff and visitors – all in a building that is architecturally, technically and sustainably outstanding. Circle Birmingham Hospital is the second hospital Bryden Wood design for Circle Health, and we incorporated all the learning from designing the awardwinning Circle Reading Hospital into this new project. The Reading hospital, opened in 2012, was designed to increase in scale from Circle Bath Hospital and adapt to the local need while maintaining the patient experience focus. As a testament to the success of this approach, Circle Reading Hospital was awarded with the Building Better Healthcare Award for ‘Best Internal Environment’ in the ‘Patient Experience’ category. In addition to prioritising patient experience, our designs for Circle Health hospitals have had to adapt to a changing healthcare landscape. The challenges to operational mobilisation and different funding flows in Circle Reading identified the need to employ a design that could respond to an emerging and evolving business case. Circle’s second brief to Bryden Wood for Circle Birmingham therefore reflected key features of the Circle Reading facility, while clearly stipulating a requirement for flexibility to accommodate a dynamic business case aligned with the organisation’s strategic development. Our ‘Design to Value’ philosophy applies our integrated design expertise to analyse projects exhaustively, and make
sure that we deliver the solution that adds the most value. We also built on all the learning that we gather from other projects. In our earlier work on Circle Reading Hospital, we conducted extensive research into the use dynamics of a hospital, optimising the layout to deliver a hospital with a design that allowed a significantly improved experience for both staff and patients. Circle Birmingham Hospital was built on the site of the former Pebble Mill BBC TV studios. The hospital opened in September 2020, with five operating theatres, ten firststage recovery beds, ten consulting rooms, 20 secondstage recovery beds and 140 bedrooms. It also has a comprehensive imaging department and a large physiotherapy capacity for elective care and rehabilitation services.
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