DrB’s Surgery
2011
Conversion of an office floor into a flexible-use doctor’s surgery.
Flexible Possible Uses.
Our client for the conversion of an office floor into a doctor’s surgery expressed a specific desire for it to be flexible in use: it should be possible for the whole floor to be used as one surgery or for the rooms to be divided and for up to two independently accessible units to be separated off and rented out.
As the examinations carried out at an ENT surgery only require small amounts of daylight, the treatment and service rooms could be placed in the central areas of this 21 x 8 m space. A public zone with window frontage and daylight has thus been created around the treatment rooms, allowing a smooth flow of arriving and departing patients. Seating niches have been recessed into the walls in the patient waiting areas.
While the doctor mainly moves in the core area between the reception and the treatment rooms, the paths that the patients take flow around those central spaces. Sliding and folding doors allow the spaces to be converted variably into smaller and larger units.
A suspended ceiling was not installed throughout the surgery, making the most of the floor to ceiling height to give a feeling of generous-sized space. An untreated concrete ceiling in the circumferential waiting area increases the contrast to the rooms that have been inserted. White acoustic machine-applied plaster has been added to the ceilings of the treatment rooms to create a feeling of comfort and intimacy. The transparent, frameless glass surfaces of the skylights provide daylight.
Different materials, which each reacts to functional requirements, define the aesthetic appearance of this retrofit. The floors and walls of the different treatment rooms and of the waiting areas have been coded into different colors corresponding to their use.
