Located on the city limits, the Douai Hospital, with its imposing dimensions (180m x 80m), stands as a grand hospital palace between town and country. To enhance the environment and create a welcoming atmosphere for patients, the redesigned park suggests a castle avenue. This axis reinforces the building’s symmetry and central location. It leads to a welcoming forecourt treated as a fully-fledged urban space, with all the necessary amenities: drop-off zone, bicycle racks, information totems, ground-level lighting, benches, heated bollards, video projections on the hall facade, etc. This transitional space between the outside and inside is protected from the elements by a large suspended canopy, glazed and covered with a reflective, colored silkscreen print whose pattern reflects the garden and the activity of the forecourt.

This compact single-space building offers a finished form but never closes, leaving openings and gaps for satellite extensions, thus internalizing the outdoor spaces and creating a relationship between the inside and outside. Its height does not exceed four stories to preserve the pleasantness of the patios which bring light and natural ventilation. The silkscreened glass facade is adorned with a geometric diamond pattern, a reference to the regional glazed brick motif.
The diagonal silvering intensifies in height and its brilliance, like a two-way mirror, alternates with the opacity of the black glass. This contrast of present/absent, blurred/precise elements gives the building an evanescence that dematerializes and lightens it. Inside the building, the atmosphere is inverted, the facades of the patios are adorned with a skin (resin concrete) in a terracotta hue, providing a rosy light.