Kunshan Western Medical Service Center Conceptual Design

Project Location: Kunshan City, Jiangsu Province
Gross Floor Area: 188,900 sqm
Design Firm: KDG
Design Year: 2012
Lead Architect: Qiu Kang

This conceptual design does not break away from traditional hospital functional layouts. On the contrary, it inherits and draws inspiration from classic hospital floor plans to achieve rational and perfected functional design.

Town-like Concept
Hospitals typically operate like small towns—bustling with people, featuring specialized departments catering to diverse needs, where individuals eat, stay, shop, and sometimes intentionally prolong their visits. Thus, we aimed to create a humanized community: a warm, sunlit town that carries vibrant daily life. To make the architecture appear open yet interconnected, most structures feature glass facades. The design adopts modular layouts and flexible interior arrangements to maximize adaptability to rapidly evolving medical technologies and research approaches. Doctors and medical staff enjoy ample sunlight, abundant collaborative spaces, and seamless communication with patients.

Garden-style
A beautiful natural environment fosters and sustains patients' joyful moods, meeting their medical, nursing, physiological, and psychological comfort needs. Extensive research shows environmental factors are crucial to patients' overall healthcare experience. Creating a memorable healing environment is itself part of medical service and serves as a positive factor in attracting and retaining patients. The expansive water feature in the plaza symbolizes the flow and continuity of the fountain of life. Combined with courtyard-style layouts, it forms multiple serene spaces for patients to stroll, exercise, rest, and enjoy scenery. The integration of interior and exterior courtyards not only increases green coverage but, more importantly, achieves organic harmony between architecture, environment, and people.

Three-Building Composition
The teaching building, comprehensive building, and arts/sports building are interwoven spatially. The horizontally-oriented teaching building sits on the northern side of the site, accommodating south-facing standard classrooms while facilitating connection with existing academic structures. The visually distinctive arts/sports building anchors the campus' southeast corner near a major external road intersection. The north-south oriented comprehensive building positions its auditorium facing the future main campus entrance, with its rooftop serving as a student activity platform. These three structures collectively frame the central landscape plaza at the campus entrance.

Soulful Architecture
True architectural art and spaces not only fulfill basic functional needs but, more crucially, enable people to acutely perceive their formal characteristics and comprehend spatial expressions—often through instantaneous moments when art resonates suddenly. This allows architecture to transcend its physical medium, accurately conveying spiritual messages. Hospital buildings should be more than places for healing; they must facilitate the interpretation and understanding of life itself.

In this design, the 200-meter-long skybridge connecting multiple buildings embodies such a space. Along its passage, one encounters the full spectrum of life—birth, aging, sickness, death, laughter, and tears—capturing life's essence. This elevated corridor breathes soul into the functionally diverse buildings, enabling dialogue among them while offering visitors contemplative perspectives on life's meaning and mortality's transcendence.