Cluj Clinical Emergency Children’s Hospital

Square Foot Garden

In this competition proposal, Tesseract chooses to build a children’s hospital is around an educational park.

The main theme of the proposed park underlines the genius loci: the agricultural use of the land, the horticulture research areas and orchards of the University. Scaling down, gardening becomes modular with its need to be better cared for, better observed. Square foot gardening optimizes the space used for the “crop”, allowing plants to grow densely and preventing weeds from doing the same.

Gardening develops into a game of green squares, enabling the mind to unwind and the children’s playtime to enter the world of fruit trees, flowers, vegetables, aromatic plants and taking their mind away from disease and directing it towards healing. The Park becomes a mix of organic shapes that mark certain types of areas and orthogonal playful grids that allow plants to interact with the hospital buildings.