Entrants were invited to design a new building for Rudolstadt Hospital (179 beds) for the specialist areas internal medicine and geriatrics.

LUDES’ design, which was awarded the runner-up prize, is based on the principal of a “healing house with a human face” instead of a “health machine with medical high-tech”.

The arrangement of three buildings around a central glazed core harmonises with the sloping ground and balances out the differences in

scale of the surrounding structures. Gone is the apparent contradiction between optimised processes as a result of the dovetailing of care and treatment areas and the need to create a differentiated milieu in each single building.

Detached from the central core and elevated on a uniform base which follows the contours of the topography, the one-to-two storey façades of the main building are made to seem like a kind of optical illusion involving a display case type of frame and a glass filling.