Excerpt: Pediatric Ward of Hospital São João, an interior design project by ARG Studio, blends a vibrant architectural language with an illustrated narrative. The project features a programmatic spectrum of spaces, from study areas to libraries, incorporating various activities and virtual games. Each room is colour-coded, creating an immersive, dynamic, and serene environment that accommodates various recovery states of mind.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] ‘Let’s go fly a kite?’ – the architecture and the illustration, a bond through an installation.
The new pediatric ward of Hospital São João in Porto, after years of expectation and media attention, has become the benchmark for the renovation and innovation of the Portuguese healthcare system. On that note, the hospital administration had the vision of not only ensuring the highest degree of treatment services but also assuring the well-being, comfort, and joy of the young patients. With this in mind, they have chosen a multidisciplinary team to project an image, a setting, and an environment for the ward’s social spaces, circulation, and leisure areas. The challenge was to establish a bond between the architectural language of the leisure area and the illustrated narrative throughout the building corridors.
The architecture set the colour, the colour engaged the illustration, and the illustration found the main character: the kite. The kite flew out of the drawings into the ward’s entrance, the place where this story begins. The kite’s installation becomes alive through the combination of simple shapes scattered along the hall and entrance corridor ceiling. Just like a child’s toy. Between the imagination and the figurative, this installation triggers the curiosity and playfulness of those who enter the building and sets the tone for the rest of the journey.
The leisure area is essential to the recovery, comfort, and well-being of the children’s stay in the ward. The Interior Architecture project by ARG Studio sets a sequence of spaces on a programmatic spectrum, from the study area to the library to physical activities, virtual games, or simply playing areas. Each room has a colour, creating an immersive setting that, as a whole, and through a varied colour palette, provides a dynamic but serene environment. This proposal allows children from a toddler to a teenager to be stimulated, offering both communal and sharing areas as well as reclusion and intimate spaces. An environment that allows the inevitable amplitude of the different recovery states of mind.
The illustration project, by Francisca Ramalho, is the kite journey along the ward. A pathway through visual landscapes filled with mysterious plants and hidden animals. An illustrated itinerary on large-scale panels that add little moments of dream and play to the walls, where it is possible to question, imagine, or simply contemplate the colourful shapes. This narrative invites a bit of fantasy to a place meant to heal pain and suffering. A place that holds many different histories—some sadder, some happier. This fantasy realm allows, even if only briefly, to fly away from the complexity of reality and rest.