3XN has shared photos of their nearly complete Copenhagen Children’s Hospital project in the Danish capital.

Spanning 58,000 square meters (about 624,300 square feet), the design will yield a total of 219 beds for children, teens, and pregnant women, 15 operating rooms, 57 ambulatory care suites for children and adolescents, another 30 for adults, 14 delivery rooms, and a nuclear diagnostics center. 

Once it opens early next year, the hospital will have a capacity for 900 persons in addition to 1,200 staff. The firm says its design is meant to harness the power of play as a palliative measure and will be completed at a cost of $350 million for its client, the Capital Region of Denmark.

Formed by two asterisk-shaped volumes meant to evoke the image of a pair of widespread hands connected together at the wrist plate, the bays inside the individual "fingers" in the design are bookended by winter gardens at the tips and share a central core reserved for family lounge areas. Bays are separated at lengths of between 7 to 20 meters (roughly 23 to 65 feet) for optimized care delivery. 

The firm's Design Partner, Stig Vesterager Gothelf, says their ambition was to "create a hospital with a home-esque and informal atmosphere where patients and their families will have a safe journey with relatable contexts and playful frameworks."

"When our children become ill, the whole family is affected. We have therefore aimed to create an environment where the family can stay close to the patient and have a life as close to what they are used to. We have worked a lot with the healing qualities of architecture, considering factors from airflow to daylight while creating opportunities for play and creativity," 3XN's founder Kim Herforth Nielsen added.

The project follows a larger design for the Copenhagen main hospital’s north wing and a patient hotel on the same site that were previously completed. The firm worked with Arkitema, Niras, Rosan Bosch Studio, and Kristine Jensens Tegnestue to deliver the project, which was officially renamed as 'The Mary Elizabeth Hospital' in June in celebration of the monarch’s 50th birthday.