The central building of Aachen University Hospital was opened in 1982 and is one of the largest hospital buildings in Europe. It has been a protected building since 2008, thereby bearing testimony to German high-tech architecture, and represents a milestone in hospital planning. It now needs some restorative work, some multi-area and structural alterations, which have made it necessary to produce a development plan covering both operational and structural facets.
The planning revolves around questions such as how the central hospital building with its building structures can do justice to the demands of a major modern hospital in the future and how the extension areas should look, bearing in mind that it is a listed building.
Together with Teamplan, LUDES was responsible for the “operational planning”. They discussed the salient points and made a recommendation in the form of an overall concept. Essentially, the concept sets out to accommodate the specialist facilities which need modernising and which from a technical and workflow point of view are quite complex, into new building modules which need to be optimally configured, situated as they are opposite the old building, while the less demanding technical and infrastructure areas remain in the old building. Both complexes are to be linked via a new main entrance. This concept creates excellent conditions for both users and patients and a high degree of functionality which has a positive effect on future operating costs.