The Cognacq-Jay hospital

As it stands today, the Hôpital Cognacq-Jay is a fantastic, stimulating structure which virtually excludes a sense of history. Its tranquil garden, interior décor and appointments, along with the paintings and photographs hanging on the walls, the strange feeling that one is in a holiday resort rather than a hospital.
Our work has been about much more than simply providing the varied and complex functions required of a hospital. When the power of rationality is manifested in architecture as the fruit of our assembled intellects, people will find in that architecture the strength and the will to live.
We have tried to create human spaces where people feel relaxed and comfortable, and striven to integrate them in an organic manner. The hospital requires many different spaces adapted to each function. Their articulation lends a human scale to the hospital as a whole and creates a extremely powerful relationship, almost one of cohabitation, between nature and architecture. Here, in communion with nature, people can find health and healing. The richly varied spaces are organically connected through the garden, which serves as the focal point of the project. The interlocking arrangement of the structures results in a fusion of solid and liquid that makes the most of the front onto the garden.
It is our hope that the Cognacq-Jay Foundation will feel more like home, a small museum, a private park or a lounge than a hospital. This is the concept that underpins our design: views of greenery from the patients' rooms, warm interiors and park-like gardens where people can take quiet walks and chat with their friends and family in the shade, alongside a stream or next to a work of art.