The Alder Centre

A Restorative Setting
The Alder Centre at the Alder Hey Children’s Hosptial in Liverpool will be a bespoke facility to support friends and families of bereaved children. The new building will offer the opportunity to provide purpose-designed, dedicated internal and external spaces to meet the needs of this specialised and sensitive support service. Our design process engaged in research about spaces that promote companionship and provide sanctuary, and we developed an understanding of what it is that makes successful restorative spaces that promotes human well-being.

Prospect and Refuge
Our design focused on the provision of intimate spaces that support individual reflection, social activity, formal and informal counseling. These spaces, whether enabling or contemplative, will follow the comfort principles of ‘prospect and refuge’: spaces that provide people with the ability to see out to a clear view, from a safe vantage point without being seen. These spaces will be found both within and outside the building – linking landscape and architecture into a unified whole.

Enabling Spaces: where there is engagement in activities led by counselors and other professionals.

Contemplative spaces: which provide an escape both for bereaved family members but also staff and volunteers.

Tree Houses
We developed the idea that contemplative spaces should have a similar sensibility to a tree house: a simple space that is secure, protected and with views out. The design is conceived as a cluster of tree houses overlooking Alder Centre’s own gardens set within its own secure boundary and beyond over the adjacent Springfield Park. A design strategy that supports a sense of being in nature and the right place for contemplation and reflection.

Journey
The approach to the building is through new planting forming part of the hospital’s ‘public realm’. It is designed to slow staff, volunteers and bereaved families at the centre down and prepare them for a change of pace and for a period of reflection. The Alder Centre is seen as ‘an escape to green’ – a ‘wanderable’ landscape that has been deliberately designed to provide a choice of route in and through the building and its landscape: a choice of experience.

Openness and Privacy
The Alder Centre is entered through a secure courtyard and a small entry space with a picture window; a place to pause. The entry space leads on to a double-height ‘lounge’ an open and welcoming space with a planted courtyard around which discreet spaces for quiet contemplation are provided. The counselling spaces, group activity room and staff spaces are all organised around the central space with further consultation and therapy spaces on the first floor.

Views and Outlook
The organisation of the building is designed to be easily read and understood: a simple arrangement but complex in that each internal space has its own discrete threshold and external space with views out to the garden or the park. Each space has large glazed areas that allow high levels of daylight in, whilst the deep reveal of the window seats provide privacy. The view out provides a focus in the distance and allows bereaved family members a view; a form of temporary escape

Inside Outside
The interiors of the building combine with outdoor spaces to create settings that are restful and restorative but which also contain a rich variety of situations so there is always a space that fits the requirements of a particular person. Each internal space feels as though it extends into the garden. These include places to retreat to a niche, sit with friends under a canopy and observe, be outside in any weather, play, explore and talk.

Approach
On the approach from the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, one of the counseling room ‘tree houses’ appears to pop out over the wall through the trees. It is evident that the room has views over the park without being over-looked by passers-by. The entrance is discreet. It is tucked away to the side between two gabion walls allowing bereaved families to quietly enter without fanfare, whilst also providing easy access from the main hospital building.

Sensorial Spaces
The exterior landscape provides a wide variety of spaces of different physical intensities. Activity points in the garden encourage movement through the landscape, and meandering paths provide opportunity to wander. Our intention is that the gardens and green spaces feel they as though they are part of ‘another world’: large and distinctive enough to allow exploration and create a sense of place.

The Alder Hey Campus
Set behind a mid-height, gabion-wall boundary, the design of the Alder Centre is designed to have a quiet presence within the hospital campus. The building is set back from the path around the edge of the park to provide privacy for the users of the building and is deliberately set back and subordinate to the bolder ‘Institute in the Park’ and the other building that will be built around the centre in the future.