A new film by Dutch architecture firm OMA and Partner Reinier de Graaf “The Hospital of the Future” have been released as a part of the exhibition, Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales at Matadero Madrid Centre for Contemporary Creation. 

What OMA calls “visual manifesto”, the 12-minute short film complicates long-standing conventions and methodologies in the field of healthcare architecture. 

Through an exploration of the role that disease has played in shaping cities, the film offers a lens into the future of what we should demand of healthcare design, ever more topical as we begin to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The film offers a vision of the hospital of the future fluctuating and adapting to future needs while also becoming a self-sufficient building typology. 

Prophecies include the hospital as omnipresent and high tech, operating like a fulfillment center, rebuilding itself from its own waste, growing its own medications, and becoming completely automatic.

The film is the culmination of a project led by OMA Partner Reinier de Graaf together with Hans Larsson and Alex Retegan that began in 2019.

“It is necessary to provide the hospital with a new definition,” says de Graaf.

“Our knowledge about the institution is becoming ever more developed, yet we seem further away than ever from imagining the right type of building for it. In exploring and visualizing a number of speculative futures, this short film hopes to offer a small contribution.”

Curator of the exhibition, Ethel Baraona Pohl, adds: “The Hospital of the Future is a precious addition to the Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales exhibition. Instead of trying to give answers, it poses vital questions about the future of the city in terms of health, economy, space, and automation.”

The short film is on view at Matadero Madrid Centre for Contemporary Creation until January 31 2021. Watch “The Hospital of the Future” here.

Hassell recently released their vision of the new Murdoch Knowledge Health Precinct in WA as a “wellness landscape”, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a source for design learning.

Images courtesy of OMA/Reinier de Graaf.