The El Carmen Hospital in Maipu responds to the first proposal for Hospital Concessions in Chile – for non-clinical services – together with its namesake in the commune of La Florida. The project consists of 70,301 m², 375 beds, 11 surgical pavilions and 6 delivery rooms, 125 medical consultations, 523 parking lots and 347 seismic isolators, to house 1,500 employees, in the most populated commune in the country.
It is located on a plot of 250m x 250m (approx. 50,500 m²), with a considerable green presence and a certain freedom in the location of the building. However, the complexity is given by a marked difference in levels in the terrain -10 meters difference between the south access and the north access-, developing a diagonal slope to the avenue that builds the main façade of the project.
This involved differentiating two main bodies: a semi-buried plinth collecting the existing slope to reduce the movement of earth, with the consequent extension and recovery of the upper level of the land as a green roof, allowing accessibility from the two levels of the building and two aerial bodies, detached from the natural level, to locate the hospitalization units, which are organized in two large parallel blocks, separated and dislocated, seeking the best orientation of the rooms (northwest) and a more domestic environment, linked to a park in the upper area of the land.
The programmatic distribution is developed in three groups: (1) two underground floors that house parking lots, clinical and non-clinical services; (2) two floors in the semi-buried plinth, which house the heart of the hospital as an emergency, radiology, pavilions and critical patients; and (3) two upper floors for the hospitalization units, which are separated by a technical gallery on the middle floor.
By virtue of the best operability, the project is developed in an absolutely horizontal clinical operation and has a fairly small urban scale for the 70,000 m² built. This can be seen in the fact that, despite having 7 floors, this is not noticeable on any of its facades.
