New hospital

The premises of the new hospital in Jihlava started to be built in the 1960s, when the now demolished Pavilion of Infectious Diseases with an interestingly designed rear façade with courtyard balconies was erected. In its vicinity, the buildings added in the 1970s and 1980s represent rather banal normalisation architecture. It was only the renovations and extensions from the 1990s, designed by the architect Jaromír Homolka from the Penta studio in Jihlava, that eventually made it more interesting. First, in 1993, he designed a facilities gatehouse, originally intended as temporary. Its bright red lightweight construction is clearly inspired by postmodern morphology. At the same time, he developed projects for several layout modifications of the existing hospital pavilions.

Jihlava Hospital's first large post-revolutionary new building was the Surgery, ICU, A&E, and CS Pavilion, which Jaromír Homolka and his colleagues worked on from 1997. The architecture of this building with an irregular floor plan is based on a playful composition of round and rectangular interpenetrating structures. The highest of them has three floors, where the architects concentrated the emergency department, operating theatres, and primarily the patients' rooms. The load-bearing system of the building consists of a reinforced concrete monolithic skeleton. Light plaster and ceramic tiles of the same shade are complemented by large glazed areas and blue details in the form of window frames and spiral staircases. With this building of different shapes and materials, the architect ingeniously enlivened the architecturally dull hospital complex. His version of postmodern architecture is distinctive, yet sophisticated.

Exactly ten years after the completion of this pavilion, Jaromír Homolka and his colleagues from the Penta studio prepared plans for another large building on the Jihlava Hospital grounds – the Pavilion of Urgent and Intensive Care (PUIP). He found a place between Homolka’s older pavilion and the medical emergency service buildings, which had also been designed by the head of Penta in the 1990s. In urban terms, the building enclosed the hospital grounds from the west side, and by connecting the heliport through a glass tunnel, the architects significantly facilitated the operation of the medical facility. The isolation ward, as well as the X-ray, CT, part of the ICU, and the emergency department were moved to the new building, which was built from 2011–2012.

In contrast to the building from the turn of the millennium, the PUIP has a clear rectangular floor plan with two staircase wings rising up from it. It is a three-storey building, with a roof extension providing another floor in the southern part. The main frontage consists of a double glass shell, necessary for sound insulation. In details such as the strip windows on the side façades and the columns that elevate the projecting front floor, continuity can be traced with architect's own older building, located in close proximity to the new one. As one of the most modern medical pavilions in the region, the Jihlava PUIP was awarded the title of Building of the Year in the Highlands Region in 2012.

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