Decoration

The treatment section has been constructed as systematically as a garrison town. The treatment level itself was built from standard units in a square system where each module measures 15 times 15 metres, separated by corridors that are three metres wide. All corridors aligned in the north-south direction are distribution corridors, while those in the perpendicular east-west axis are treatment corridors. From the treatment corridors, one gains access to the individual treatment sections, all of which are illuminated by skylights. These include the department of radiology, the x-ray department, ear-nose-throat, and the blood bank. Every one of the clinics occupies at least one, and frequently several squares.

The treatment building is primarily white, in order to underscore its difference from the lying-in areas. But “primarily” is not to be taken as meaning “exclusively,” because here the artist has employed a smaller selection of colours as hints or symbolic references. It could be said that the colours operate as a sign system. At one spot, the colours have been allotted a symbolic or pedagogic function, while at another, they are functional and practical. Nothing is accidental – and in any event, nothing is inconsequential – for anybody concerned. Everywhere, the choice of colour has been conceived in relation to a collective field of functions, signals and systems. The aesthetic experience is almost a side effect.

The entirety of the hospital has been thoroughly envisioned, all the way down to the interior layout of the individual rooms and every visible detail, in an admixture of practical considerations and positively stimulating visual experiences. The overall corridor floorage in the treatment building is enormous, and it’s easy to lose one’s bearings. In order to separate the individual outpatient clinics from one another, they have each been marked with a coloured frieze. The purpose of these friezes or “bellybands” – as architect Erik Schytt Poulsen called them – is to give people a quick and somewhat reliable pointer indicating the specialization of each section. Almost all the colours chosen by the artist, posses a distinctly associative value. 

They operate as a function determined colour symbolism. Spring green, for example, has been used for the maternity ward. Ox-blood red has been used for the blood bank. Blue-violet is used for the pathological department, and light blue is used for the eye clinic (since light blue is the colour of the sky we see above us). Other colours are a little more difficult to decipher, but they work, nonetheless. These is chrome orange for the department of oncology, dark green for the emergency room and operating rooms, cyclamen-pink for the training and physical therapy departments, a soft skin-tone colour for plastic surgery, lemon yellow for the department of rheumatology, and so on. Moreover, the friezes contain arrows and explanations that guides the way.

Apart from the information aspect, the “bellybands” satisfy another practical function. They have been positioned at a particular height, precisely at the distance from the floor where the walls are exposed to the greatest wear and tear due to the transport of the beds and other clinical traffic. In case of damage, one does not need to repair a whole surface of wall. It’s enough to paint the belt. Generally speaking, damages and scratches will not seem as conspicuous on a painted surface as they would on a white wall.

Since there are practical concerns behind almost all of the colour schemes in the building, something as fundamental as the floor has naturally also been embraced by the colourist programme. The blue flooring in the corridor areas has been chosen on the basis of considerations about traffic safety. Blue is generally considered to be the most “yielding” colour in the spectrum. You might say that it “pushes” forward in our field of vision everything that is placed in front of it or passes over it. At the same time, blue is a practical colour for a floor that is incessantly being worn down by pedestrian and light-vehicular traffic. Here the elderly and the very young, the sick and the healthy are moving amongst each other and here, electrically powered vehicles carrying different kinds of apparatus move to and fro. 

The signposting in the hospital has been executed in such a way that that sign into the areas are blue, while those out are green. The blue triggers associations with the blue inside the hospital’s confines, while the green naturallyrefers to the lawn areas outside the building. Prohibitions, on the other hand, are signalled in red, as they are in road traffic.

In order to maximize traffic safety inside the building, the glass doors have been equipped with red borders. Corridor-transport trucks sport sensational cyclamen-pink stripes and the bumpers are red. Moreover, warning colours have been laid into the floors, and parking areas are marked with green. The transport vehicles are also coloured according to what loads they are carrying.