Almost 25000 m² of ALUCOBOND® panels were produced and installed to create Rush-Hospitals curvilinear shape. All photos: R. R. Gigliotti, Chicago l Für die kurvige Kubatur des Rush-Hospitals wurden fast 25.000 m2 ALUCOBOND®-Tafeln mit CAD passgenau produziert und montiert. BRIGHT ICON Project: Rush University Medical Centre, Chicago I USA Architects: Perkins + Will, Chicago | USA Construction: Tray panels - special construction Year of Construction: 2011 Product: ALUCOBOND® plus custom colours Architects at Perkins + Will built a tower for Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago. It now enhances the iconic Chicago skyline with its butterfly-like form and white ALUCOBOND® panels. The architects even received the prestigious AIA award for their work. The concept behind the design, however, was not to create an icon; it was a means of: optimising the functional processes in the interior, enhancing the lighting within a vast structure, located within a crowded urban landscape, improving the building’s energy balance and connecting existing and new buildings. The tower’s base covers the whole rectangular building plot. Situated on six floors, there are not only facilities for diagnosis, consultation and therapy plus operation theatres for different fields of medicine but also the central accident and emergency department. A glass façade and the surrounding open design of the corridors let light penetrate deep into the interior of the building. Patient accommodation, with its butterfly geometry, is set on stilts on top of the base. Its conspicuous shape fulfils a number of requirements: it links 386 patients’ rooms keeping distances to a minimum, forms a functional core with access, infrastructure and staff facilities and allows the maximum of daylight into the building. The successful dovetailing of the individual, different structures is the aspect which creates exceptional architecture with high-level spatial qualities. Both parts of the tower are linked by a closed, recessed technical floor with a spacious roof garden. The complete new tower connects with the existing building via a two-storey pavilion, which also features a roof garden. Once again, the function determines the design. The glass envelope covering the pavilion opens out towards the road, signposts the new entrance and brings light into the linking building which would otherwise be in shadow. The perspectives upwards from the interior through the pavilion roof connect the existing building with the new-build and create a visual whole. Forms & Elements 02/2015 18
ALUCOBOND® | Forms & Elements
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