Exterior lighting St. Joseph at Stift Hospital, Dresden

Lighting concept west wing hospital, Dresden

By 2018, the St. Joseph Stift Hospital in Dresden built the new West Wing. With this future central outpatient clinic, an important new main frequency point of the hospital was created. Ruairí O’Brien developed the lighting design and a holistic orientation system for the exterior of the hospital.
For the exterior lighting, we considered this new hospital area in five local areas / spaces with different functions and developed appropriate lighting proposals for each.

• Access and entrance area emergency ambulance (night entrance, ambulance access)
• Entrance underground parking
• Bicycle parking
• Entrance area with canopy, external staircase, ramp
• Patient garden
• Entrance to residential area for nuns

In addition to supporting the various functions, our lighting design also takes into account the legal lighting requirements and the optimal fulfillment of safety aspects, such as a glare- and shadow-free design for the lighting of circulation areas, good facial recognition and optimal illumination of the space. Supporting the hospital’s new exterior orientation system was another design concern. Different brightnesses, colors of light and accentuations, e.g. of the entrance, creating a lighting hierarchy that supports intuitive human orientation. For the canopy as an asymmetrical element, we proposed a lighting design that supports its architecture and creates a strong visual connection between the exterior and interior. The entrance becomes more easily perceived as such from far and near.