Healthcare sustainable design in Colombia

The paper illustrates the methods applied and the results achieved in some activities focused on the sustainable urban development and hospital planning, located in the Colombian central Andes, with particular reference to the project for the new Mother and Child hospital and for the new Campus of the University Foundation Juan de Castellanos of Tunja. The Laboratory STEP is engaged for several years in many activities of Inter-national Cooperation in the developing countries; during the unfolding of these ac-tivities, an integrated methodological approach has gradually established. It is re-lated to the disciplinary research conducted over the years by the group on the topic of technical feasibility of the building and it is based on three keywords: knowledge, feasibility and sustainability. In the campus are going to rise not only the hospital, but also some faculties such as Social Sciences and Economics, Medicine and Engineering as well as re-search facilities, services and housing. From the reading of the morphological and climatic aspects, the main guide-lines for the campus design had been outlined: as climate has necessarily had an impact on social and cultural development of the context, the design project re-spects nature and the landscape surrounding using free energy resources and local materials. The project of the hospital starts from a modular scheme, both for the patient rooms and for the emergency and surgery. It pursues the general objectives of ar-chitectural, morphological and technological innovation in terms of spatial and functional layout as well as the criteria for the humanization of the patient rooms, applying the hospital design strategies developed in the last 15 years by Laboratory STEP. Themes of the project are environmental sustainability, energy efficiency both for the building envelope and for the environmental comfort control, the integration of piping and the energy production from renewable sources.