Västerås femte lasarett – en studie i 1920-talets svenska sjukhusbyggande

In the 1920s, hospital building in Sweden underwent a period of successive change. Inspiration came from the USA, where high property prices, new building techniques and progressive attitudes to medical hygiene gave rise to skyscraper solutions and their accompanying complex layouts. It was these principals – albeit in more diffuse form than in the USA – that Swedish hospital architects now began to apply. When Ernst Stenhammar, one of the architects who specialised in hospitals, designed the new Västerås county hospital, he therefore chose a complex layout with central corridors: a planning principle that was regarded as modern and fit for purpose. Because the hospital was never expanded or otherwise altered,Stenhammar’s Västerås hospital remains Sweden’s best-preserved example from the 1920s. The old hospital was gradually recommissioned when the first phase of the new county hospital opened in 1968. Once empty, the old hospital slid into dereliction. For some time, demolition was seen as the only alternative, but this was avoided at the last minute. Its renovation, beginning in 2006 and completed in 2009, shows how former hospital buildings can be repurposed without entirely altering their erstwhilemedical character