Discover the new Monopoli-Fasano hospital
The project is a response to the region’s need to build a health facility of reference, innovative and sustainable architecture. The building has a volumetry open to its surroundings, located between the sea and hills, in an area of olive and carob trees.
Context and origin
The new Monopoli-Fasano hospital was created within the framework of the Apulia health network reorganisation plan, launched in 2010 with the aim of replacing fragmented and obsolete hospitals with modern, accessible and patient-centred infrastructures. In the south-east of Bari, the fragmentation of care and the shortcomings of existing hospitals in Monopoli and Fasano highlighted the urgent need for a single, efficient and reference centre for an area of influence that exceeds 200,000 inhabitants. The intervention is thus part of a broader strategy in the region: modernising hospital care, reducing unnecessary hospitalisations and promoting closer integration between health and social services.
Setting, shape and location
The new hospital is located between the urban centers of Monopoli and Fasano, in Apulia, in southern Italy, on an area characterized by large cultivations of carob and monumental olive trees of great landscape value.
The formal design is based on the respect and valorization of the strong points of the land in order to generate the least possible impact on the surrounding landscape. The building, located in the center of the site, guarantees privacy and acoustic isolation, maintaining an adequate distance that respects the boundaries of the plot.
Formally, the hospital is divided into modular, autonomous and multifunctional units, connected to each other by links that allow maximum interrelation between all the services provided by the hospital complex.
Functional program
The hospital is articulated on three levels above ground and an underground, with an area of about 63,000 m2 in an area of more than 17 hectares. On the underground level are the logistics and technological area, and the upper floors are used for the care and care of patients: outpatients, emergencies, diagnosis, surgical block, intensive therapy, and in the south, oriented towards Murgia, the hospitalization units. In total, the hospital has 299 beds distributed in different specialized areas.
The structure that articulates the different areas of the hospital is a large space of double height illuminated from above, where the most public services are found: cafeteria, conference room, shops and places of worship.
The building is characterized by a structural modular mesh designed to house in the best possible way the modules of hospitalization rooms and medical consultations. Modularity guarantees flexibility and gives room to the future transformation of the building.
Landscape and therapeutic experience
The courtyards interspersed between the modules allow the penetration of the landscape into the building, ensuring maximum sunlight and natural ventilation, offering a direct relationship between the patient and nature, which acts positively on the user and mitigates the psychological discomfort associated with hospitalization.
The physical and visual integration between the green areas and those destined for patients and visitors, favors the domestic character and environmental control of the building, and represents a distinctive value in the therapeutic experience, developing opportunities for meeting and socializing in shared spaces.
Green hospital
The new hospital has several sustainability strategies that promote passive and active architecture by improving energy efficiency, with the use of wooden pergolas on the façade and roofs using materials of local Mediterranean tradition to mitigate solar radiation; the installation of renewable energy sources; and the reuse of rainwater for irrigation.
At the same time, it is conceived as a park-hospital, where the preservation and replanting of monumental olive and carob trees reinforces the cultural identity of the place and links it closely with the agricultural memory of Apulia.