USZ Nord 3

USZ - a Cluster of Knowledge and Healthcare in Transformation
The University Hospital Zurich (USZ) is embedded within the knowledge and healthcare cluster of the Hochschulgebiet Zürich Zentrum, operating near the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich at the center of the city. The USZ is pursuing a comprehensive transformation within the next few decades. A milestone in this renewal is NORD 3, a new central building for diagnostic and laboratory medicine on the Schmelzberg site, consolidating today's spatially fragmented laboratory and pathology functions into a single, future-oriented facility.

The Laboratory Reimagined
Diagnostic and laboratory buildings are no longer sealed containers of technical performance alone. Contemporary research depends on architectures that move beyond isolation and technical enclosure, giving spatial form to exchange, collaboration, and long-term adaptability. E2A translates these conditions into the proposal for USZ NORD 3. The project establishes an architecture for research that supports scientific work, collective exchange, and ongoing transformation over time—without reducing the building to a fixed technical object.
 

Landscape, Campus, Building
Developed from the topographic condition of the site, NORD 3 reinterprets the landscape cascade, the building, and the surrounding open space as one continuous campus system. The cascading stair becomes an address, connective spine, and vertical framework, while the building is conceived as a platform for research, collaboration, and long-term adaptability. Its spatial organization is shaped by both system and context: by the internal logic of diagnostic and laboratory infrastructure as much as by the broader topographic logic of the campus.

A wide-span hybrid structural skeleton establishes the project's spatial and technical framework. Material and construction are developed as a resource strategy informed by prefabrication, hybrid systems, reduced CO₂ emissions through recycled aggregates and low-energy cement mixes, and design for disassembly. This logic extends into the open space, where the landscape is developed as part of the cascading topography itself, integrating retention, infiltration, biodiversity, and cooling into the project's sequence of access, movement, and use.