The Serena del Mar Hospital Center (CHSM), designed by Safdie Architects in Cartagena, (Colombia), considers the access to landscape and natural light to be essential in order to obtain better therapeutic experiences for patients, their families and healthcare personnel. The hospital has been gradually opened to the public since the beginning of this year and is part of the masterplan of the new civic district El Gran Canal.

The CHSM is conceived as a garden hospital and is the first polyclinic in the city. The theme of nature takes shape in the outline of the building and in the lake that surrounds it, as well as in the great variety of gardens with bamboo courtyards and a specific garden for the treatment of cancer patients.

The five parts that make up the structure have little depth in order to maximize the proximity of the spaces to the windows, thus increasing natural lighting and the view of the water, hills and gardens. And this has also applied to clinical spaces, emergency rooms and laboratories.

"In most hospitals, you are in an environment that’s oppressive. You have no sense of where you are, you have no light. We approached the hospital with two ideas in mind: one, that daylight is key; the other is that gardens, courtyards, and water are already places of healing,” said Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, founder of the studio.