Great Expectations
Irish Examiner, Monday December 5th 2005

If Cork University Hospital was once dubbed The Wilton Hilton, what name will be given to the new, triangular-shaped €50 million maternity hospital right in front of it?Here are three for starter: the Bump, the Womb with a View, or Arrivals Lounge?

Bulging its way into the work, and blocking out much of the ageing CUH main hospital building behind, is the glorious, triangular shaped maternity building which will amalgamate all of Cork’s current maternity services.

The 17,000 square metre building, with five maternity/medical floors and another floor for UCC teaching/research, is due for start up by late 2006, say CUH general manager Tony McNamara, skipping the easy analogy of a nine-month countdown and opting instead for a 10-12 month period to equip, fine tune and staff-up.

Finished on the outside, and largely finished internally too, the aesthetically pleasing building fills out the former Regional’s front garden.

It’s more than an extension, it’s an entire building, largely self-contained (with an internal courtyard crying out for a landscaping benefactor), though the catering for mothers and others will come via a pending €7 million upgrade of the CUH’s main kitchens.

Designed by Reddy O’Riordan Staehli Architects, who toyed with all sorts of shapes before going for the triangle option. This shape gave the most useful building space without impinging and blocking out too much light on the existing brick-faced CUH wards.

A triangular point comes closest to its none-too-pretty parent building at a mid-section used for circulation space.

The building – five years in gestation and 32 months on-site delivery. Michael Regan’s wife also had a baby during his care of this building, and Reddy O’Riordan Staehli architects’ practice have had no fewer than 12 pregnancies in the past 24 months. Now, that’s commitment to a project’s ethos.

“We’re a pro-life firm” quips Donogh O’Riordan. And, if he has been playing God just a little bit, he can be forgiven. In this house, there are many rooms: some 864 in all.

The bouncing new building was visited this month by a group of 53 British and Irish obstetricians and gynaecologists, who rated it among the most advanced integrated facilities in Europe, and reckoned it had been delivered on a competitive budget too.

With 53 neo-natal cots for high-care baby needs, plus 150 beds for mothers, it will also be the largest of its type in Ireland. To cope with the amalgamation of the Erinville, St Finbarr’s and Bon Secour’s hospitals’ maternity services, the new building needs its 864 rooms, which will include 12 delivery suites, 10 of which are relatively standard but comfortably hi-tech.

According to the hospital’s Tony McNamara, the CUH is in the midst of a €200 million capital investment programme. This includes the new radiology unit, the €13 million A&E which opened this year, a day procedure unit overhead with 35 recovery beds, and a €48 million new cardiac/ renal/ oncology building which tender within weeks.

This is due to go on site between the CUH main entrance and the entrance to the maternity hospital and will screen yet more physical sections of the old Regional from Public gaze. Sections of the vast site to the rear will probably eventually accommodate underground car-parking.

When the programme of works is complete, the overall CUH complex will see bed numbers jump from 600 to around 1,000 and jobs will also increase. Currently, about 2,500 people are employed at the hospital Campus.

Numbers forecast to work at the maternity hospital haven’t been finalised and are under negotiation, but are likely to exceed the amount of staff in the three city maternity centres which are currently operating.

The tangible, and deliberate, feel of the place is part hotel/part hospital. Part of the design brief was to not have the place feel too much like a hospital, explains Michael Regan: “After all, most of the people coming in here aren’t sick, they’re healthy,” he notes. So, interior touches include gently curved corridors (part of the triangle shape effect), walnut and maple doors and joinery, colour themes varying many of the room floors, albeit carpet (impermeable cationic nylon, with welded seams) which has passed the most stringent hygiene and cleaning tests.

The building will be notable for its part-canopied and cambered access bridge, its sleek, no fuss exterior with ducts, drainpipes and extracts well-concealed.