Contractor-led consortium wins RIBA-run design contest

A Laing O’Rourke-led consortium has won a competition to design and build a £120m cancer centre for Guy’s Hospital.

Laing – who partnered with Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, Arup and Stantec Anshen + Allen – overcame stiff competition from the likes of Mace and Lend Lease.

The winning design is based around the idea of breaking the building down into three-storey “villages” to humanise the scale of the building, Guy’s Hospital said.

Work on the pre-construction design is expected to take around 12 months, with build completion expected in 2015.

The unsuccessful teams on the shortlist were:

  • Woods Bagot, BDP and Brookfield Construction n Hopkins Architects and Skanska UK
  • Grimshaw, Jonathan Bailey and Bovis Lend Lease
  • Make Architects and Mace
  • Allies and Morrison, Devereux Architects and Kier Regional

The longlist of nine included Foster + Partners with Vinci, Zaha Hadid with Balfour Beatty and Will Alsop at RMJM with Shepherd. Foster’s partner Spencer de Grey had stepped down from the judging panel in order to allow the firm to bid.

An entry from Sir Robert McAlpine with Rafael Viñoly is understood to have lost out earlier.

Alastair Gourlay, programme director of estate development at the hospital trust, added: “The centre will make a huge difference to our patients, transforming the service and enabling us to provide the majority of our cancer services in state-of-the-art facilities, under one roof.”

Topics