What we know about the upcoming Malpensa Hospital: inside Zaha Hadid Architects’ vision

Just minutes from one of Europe’s busiest airport hubs, a project is taking shape that feels less like a conventional healthcare facility and more like an experiment in rethinking what a hospital can be. It will rise between Milan and Varese — more precisely between Busto Arsizio and Gallarate — replacing the existing hospitals, while increasing the total number of beds currently available across the two sites. The competition drew some of the most prominent international practices, including Snøhetta, OMA, BIG and Mario Cucinella Architects, which completed Milan’s San Raffaele “Iceberg” extension three years ago. The jury ultimately selected Zaha Hadid Architects for its “ability to integrate into the territory, creating a structure that is not only a healthcare hub but also a welcoming public facility, a new centre of gravity within a low-density urban fabric”.

In other words, this hospital is expected to be more than a “simple” medical facility. It is conceived as an opportunity to enhance the surrounding area, bringing new infrastructure and visibility with it.

This is why the traditional multi-block model — rooted in the 1980s and now out of step with contemporary needs — is no longer enough. “We proposed an evolution of the poly-block system, conceptually rotating the inpatient wings and linking them to form a courtyard,” explains Paolo Zilli, director at Zaha Hadid Architects and project lead. The aim is clear: to create a system capable of responding to needs that go beyond the purely clinical.

“The project began with the reading of a fragile ecology,” says Zilli: a continuous green strip cutting through a landscape fragmented by industrial sheds and infrastructure. Nearby stands Cascina dei Poveri, a historic farmhouse that still housed around 400 residents in 1918 and remained in use until the early 1970s, when it was abandoned. “It is not formally part of the project, but we were asked to suggest possible new uses,” including support facilities for the hospital and accommodation for patients’ families. Today, the building is protected by FAI as “a significant historical presence in the area”.

Paolo Zilli, director at Zaha Hadid Architects

Rather than inserting a new volume “from above”, the building lifts off the ground and behaves “like a buckle”: it allows the landscape to pass through it, drawing the park into the central courtyard. An internal “main street” connects the public entrance to the landscaped areas of the campus, while the ground floor becomes a sequence of open, public routes and the roofs turn into accessible spaces. Specialised parking areas — for dialysis and emergency care — are positioned closer to the building, while visitor parking is set further away, hinting at a slower, more gradual approach through the surrounding woodland.

In traditional hospital models, efficiency is measured through compactness: double corridors, mirrored rooms and strictly separated circulation for staff and visitors. It is an efficient system — but one that has often overlooked the emotional experience of patients. In Zaha Hadid Architects’ proposal, the courtyard becomes the key device for balancing efficiency with psychological wellbeing. The jury described it as an hortus conclusus, yet it is large enough to avoid direct overlooking between rooms. As Zilli notes, “in traditional multi-block hospitals, at least 75 per cent of rooms face another room. Patients are effectively looking at other patients.”

Paolo Zilli, director of Zaha Hadid Architects

The separation of inpatient wings is therefore not just a formal move, but a statement about the role of space in healing. Patients’ views are instead directed outwards towards the landscape — echoing, perhaps, the humanistic approach of Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium, where recovery is closely tied to the perception of the surrounding environment.

“But this isn’t only about patients,” Zilli adds. “The design also focuses on medical and support staff, who spend most of their time here.” Staff areas overlook smaller, more private green courtyards — quiet, inward-facing gardens that act as spaces for decompression. This human-centred approach is also reflected in the use of warm materials such as timber, still relatively uncommon in hospital design. However, there are precedents in Europe, such as Herzog & de Meuron’s University Children’s Hospital in Zurich, completed in 2025, where timber plays a central role both inside and out. Zilli, notably, is also the architect who used bamboo for the ceilings and floors of Milan’s CityLife Shopping District, aiming to make residents feel “as if they were in their own living room”.

While the spatial concept focuses on wellbeing, the construction strategy is deliberately straightforward. The hospital will consist of five storeys above ground and one basement level, covering a total area of 90,000 square metres. Completion is currently targeted for 2031.

Confidence in meeting this timeline rests on a simple construction system based on an 8 × 8 metre structural grid. Most rooms are standardised — either single or double — allowing flexibility over time as needs evolve. At the corners, where the geometry becomes more complex, the solution is disarmingly simple: larger rooms. Several design decisions are also intended to streamline construction. The same modular logic used in the plan is reflected in the façades, simplifying the building process. The main façade is composed of prefabricated cellular elements attached to the floor slabs, with joints positioned at parapet level. “This allows for faster construction and reduces temporary works, as there is no need for additional site parapets,” Zilli explains.

In contemporary hospital design, spatial organisation is increasingly based on the principle of intensity of care — a model that arranges departments according to patients’ clinical needs rather than medical specialisations. In this project, the underground level concentrates logistics, storage and technical systems, freeing the upper floors for care and social interaction. Circulation routes are carefully separated to minimise interference and reduce the risk of contamination, with dedicated paths for visitors, staff and automated systems.

The Greater Malpensa Hospital can thus be read almost as a vertical section: from the technical basement, one moves upwards into a constructed landscape of services, terraces and accessible roofs. In a territory that is neither fully urban nor rural, the hospital attempts to function simultaneously as public space, ecological infrastructure and place of care. If this approach sounds familiar, it is because healthcare design has increasingly moved in this direction in recent years. A comparable example will rise just a few kilometres away: the new Cremona hospital by Mario Cucinella Architects, where attention to people, healing, green space and nature is central. Designed in 2023, the project features two large terraced semicircles enclosing a vast, fully planted space at ground level. Rather than an exception, the Malpensa hospital belongs to a broader shift in healthcare design — one in which efficiency remains essential but is no longer enough to define quality. Relationships with the landscape, with daily users and with the wider territory now play a crucial role. “We want to humanise the hospital, moving away from the typical sterility of this building type,” Zilli concludes — an ambitious but widely shared goal: to design spaces where architecture itself becomes part of the healing process.