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| Contractors transform the ExCel centre in east London into the NHS Nightingale hospital in late March. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/AP |
It is an Olympian effort of scaffolding, marquees, inflatable tents and portable cabins, as existing buildings have been repurposed in a matter of days. With construction having to begin before plans were finalised in many cases, architects, engineers and fabricators are responding at a speed that leaves time for no more than basic essentials. This is emergency architecture at its most elemental.
Portakabin, the York-based firm that has been synonymous with prefab buildings for 60 years, has been at the frontline since mid-February, delivering many of the emergency structures. They began by erecting assessment pods and isolation units in hospital car parks, and they are now working on the government’s national programme ...
While companies such as Portakabin have been supplying standard modular shells as usual, with the factories working full pelt, some situations have required more bespoke solutions. One of the most technically demanding of the temporary structures so far has been the transformation of the ExCel convention centre at the Docklands area in east London into an emergency field hospital, NHS Nightingale, ultimately capable of holding 4,000 patients.
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| Inside Nightingale hospital in London. Photograph: Sergeant Donald Todd (RLC)/British Ministry of Defence/EPA |
Completed in nine days, it has – like every other part of the national response to Covid-19 – been worked out on the fly. The location was settled on in mid-March, after other large sports halls and warehouses were considered. The ventilation system is equipped to handle large numbers of people, the floors are riddled with mechanical service boxes and there is a readily available supply of modular partitions and teams of technicians used to mounting exhibitions overnight.
“The strategy was all about using as much of the existing infrastructure as possible,” says James Hepburn of BDP architects, who led on the design team for the project. “It was clear on day one how difficult procurement was going to be, as a lot of factories were shutting down. We used the exhibition partitions with a bit of extra stiffening to create the bedheads, then ran the power, water, drainage and medical gas in a long service run behind, mirroring the bed bays on either side.” Visibility between the bays was key, given that the doctors will each be charged with many more patients than usual.
The site became a 24-hour production line, coordinated by army personnel, seeing vinyl floor laid, partitions erected and teams of electricians assembling prefabricated dado trunking to be screwed to the bedheads as soon as they were up. The central boulevard between the conference halls, usually home to networking delegates, has been transformed into a controlled zone where medics don and doff protective clothing, while the waterfront cafes have become their much-needed rest areas.
Learning from their experiences, BDP has produced a “how to” guide, drawn in the clear diagrammatic style of an Ikea furniture-building manual, to help other projects. Similar emergency hospitals are under way in Bristol, Harrogate, Birmingham and Manchester. Despite the rushed intensity of the process, might the whole experience offer some lessons for the future?
“If someone asked you to design a hospital like this, you would normally say you need six months and an enormous team of carefully selected individuals, not a group of people thrown together over a weekend,” says Hepburn. “Here, there wasn’t the usual ‘design responsibility matrix’ or any of the admin that bogs everyone down. It was a very liberating, free-form collaborative approach, and it shows what’s possible when everyone really pulls together with a common goal.”
“If we ever get back to normal,” he adds, “projects are going to become very frustrating when someone says no.”
Source: How to build a hospital in nine days: emergency architecture in a pandemic, The Gurdian, April 7, 2020.