Located in Shengzhou, Zhejiang Province, Shengzhou People's Hospital as a public Grade-A tertiary hospital is not merely to build a large-scale hospital with 1,500 beds, but to create a medical environment featuring humanistic atmosphere of the early 20^th century.

To perfectly combine medical functionality with the style of the Republican period was no small challenge for the architects. As found by the architect in the design process, there is no comparison between contemporary hospitals and hospitals one century ago in terms of hospital scale, as what could be solved by a single system in the past now becomes more complicated. This explains why contemporary hospitals mostly adopt centralized high-rises to improve their operational efficiency. Yet in this project, the architect had to design spaces with peculiar features of the Republican period to meet complicated functional demands. Secondly, from an aesthetic perspective, “the style of the Republican period” is a broad formal concept that requires lots of studies on the diverse architectural forms prevailing in the early 20^th century, so as to extract typical elements and transform the demands of the owner into a rational architectural language.

Under the premise of ensuring functionality, the architect changes the original medical corridor into a bend L-shape around the central courtyard based on the characteristics of garden spaces, with its inner side directly facing the courtyard. The hospital’s core components — outpatient, emergency and medical technology units of the hospital are respectively located in several four-story buildings of similar scales that “hang” on the outer edge of the L-shaped medical corridor. Open to the courtyard on one side, the medical corridor becomes vivid and intriguing, soothing the nerves of any anxious patients. In terms of architectural style, the combination of Chinese and Western elements in the Republican period evolves into a certain warmth of design that not only relates to proportions, decorations and landscape elements but acts more like a scenic metaphor for the sense of inner warmth and safety offered to its inhabitants.