A Pediatric Cancer Center in Spain Brings the Outdoors In
March 1, 2023
Words: Jesse Dorris
Photography: Arnau Rovira
Covering an astonishing 20,000 acres, Spain’s verdant Parc de Collserola in metropolitan Barcelona is the city’s largest green space, home not only to medieval ruins and Foster + Partners’s famed telecommunications tower but also to hundreds of species of flora and fauna. These inhabitants, with their diverse strengths and strategies for survival, have for the last decade inspired interior designer Rai Pinto and graphic designer Dani Rubio Arauna, principals of their respective eponymous studios, in a joint effort to breathe new life into Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, a medical complex on the edge of the city’s “green lung.”
For the hospital’s Pediatric Cancer Center Barcelona, housed in a new building by architecture firm Pinearq, the collaborating designers sought to continue their ongoing tribute to what Pinto calls “extraordinary nature” throughout the 71,000-square-foot, three-floor facility. They had already introduced “an enormous number of animals in the hospital” in previous projects, Rubio notes. An octopus, which typically has three hearts, is a kind of mascot in the cardiology unit. And more than 100 other 2-D and 3-D creatures, including lacquered-plywood tigers and adhesive-vinyl jellyfish, watch over the ER department in an installation that won a 2014 Interior Design Best of Year Award in the healthcare category.
