Liege welcomes MontLégia hospital

Healing environment on former mining site

On the vast site of a former coal mine, located on one of the many hills surrounding Liège, MontLégia groups the activities of three Liège hospitals of the CHC Group. The imposing healthcare complex is the new figurehead of a peripheral area that already hosted a residential care center and will eventually also house a business park, buildings (offices, labs and clean rooms for biotechnology companies), CHC's headquarters, an eco-district and several mixed projects. With more than seven hundred traditional hospital beds and a day hospital for about one hundred flat patients, MontLégia has about the same medical capacity as the two other major hospital complexes in the Liège region (CHU Sart-Tilman and CHR Citadelle). This feat of healthcare architecture was realized by dozens of companies, including some of Belgium's largest construction companies.

The white wings, which house the hospital rooms, are low-energy buildings. They are clad in ceramic façade panels.

The ambitious MontLégia project, designed by Assar Architects in collaboration with artau architectures, is a textbook example of a progressive realization that manages to redeem the rich potential of a desolate industrial no man's land. The remnants of the Patience & Beaujonc coal mine, which laid down its books back in 1929, had long been an eyesore for the proud people of Liège. Until the management of CHC decided to merge three urban hospitals there (Saint-Joseph, Espérance and Saint-Vincent) into one contemporary "healing environment. "Building a new hospital offered us the best guarantees in terms of accessibility and comfort - not only for patients, but also for caregivers. At MontLégia, we can set the strategic lines for the next thirty to forty years, more specifically by increasing the synergy between the various medical disciplines," CHC echoes.

Pierre Maurice Wéry, associate architect at Assar, says: "CHC had two main requirements: to separate the 'mother-child' wing from the 'adult' section and to locate the hospitalization next to the medical-technical services. To meet these to the maximum extent, we accommodated these functions in several blocks separated from each other and grafted the spatial layout onto the concept of a 'care street' connecting all the care units and medical-technical services. This also allowed us to immediately separate the various streams of circulation in the hospital in an efficient manner."

The spatial layout is based on the concept of a "care street" that connects all care units and medical-technical services.

Crucible of talent

To bring large-scale projects like MontLégia to fruition, different talents and specializations must be combined in the bosom of the design team. Assar's project manager watched over the overall aesthetic and architectural coherence, specialized hospital architects used their healthcare expertise, technical designers bent over specific building components (facades, canopies ...) and executive architects kept an eye on the site.    

Wéry: "Assar's philosophy is to realize each project as a team. By adopting different perspectives, we ensure that the final result visually matches the original design and that the hospital is conceptually responsive to the needs of the building owner. Our work is only successful when it is invisible to users walking through the building. Making complexity look logical and natural: that's the challenge!"

"No high-performance hospital without a focused care architecture," adds project manager Alwin Fable. "For example, we have a major impact on general hygiene and therefore bear an important responsibility in this regard. Once we had finalized the medical dimension of the project, we paid attention to patient comfort, compliance with existing standards and the separation of the various circulation flows. By optimally reconciling all these criteria, we managed to create a pleasant environment for patients, which is also very user-friendly for the medical staff." 

The hospital rooms are equipped with wide windows that have lower parapets and lintels than usual, giving patients an unobstructed view of the outside world.

Rooms with hotel feel

The architects also looked closely at energy consumption. "The white wings, which house the hospital rooms, are low-energy buildings," says Fable. "They are encased with a thick layer of insulation, applied to an aluminum structure, and clad with ceramic façade panels. However, the energy consumption of the medical-technical block and surgical wards is a lot higher. It was therefore impossible to make those buildings passive."

The atrium at the entrance to the hospital is quite imposing.

Remarkably, most of the 24 operating rooms are bathed in natural light. "The compact and comfortable rooms must also exude a real 'hotel' feel," says Wéry. "We enlisted the help of designers specialized in that area." The hospital rooms are also equipped with wide windows, which have lower parapets and lintels than usual. "We 'lowered' the facade grid so that patients have an unobstructed view of the outside world, not just of the clouds drifting by. In this way, we also immediately reduced direct sunlight, which also reduced the risk of overheating. This also means that there was no need for outdoor screens or additional ventilation grilles."

The rehabilitation pool offers a nice view of the green surroundings.

Construction challenges

It was no easy feat to erect a "mastodon" like MontLégia on a battered site that had been littered with mine shafts and all manner of embankments in the past. As many as 2,300 piles were driven into the ground to ensure the stability of the building. A second major challenge lay in the fact that the architects had to align teams from three hospitals with different working methods. "It took blood, sweat and tears to figure out a common vision. As an architect, you can play a crucial role in this process, where the explicit aim was to create valuable synergies. We are pleased that this has ultimately succeeded," Fable said.

"Problems and challenges are inherent in any construction project," Wéry concludes. "It just comes down to addressing all possible issues thoughtfully and thoroughly, knowing that the 'client' is not so much the builder as the building itself. If everyone keeps this in mind and all noses point in the same direction, the quality of the project will benefit. MontLégia is living proof of this...."