THE ROYAL ADELAIDE HOSPITAL SITE OPEN IDEAS PROCESS
The Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH) is a significant and much-loved site, located at the east end of the North Terrace cultural boulevard. It’s a place that many South Australians have a strong emotional connection with – the Kaurna community, the medical profession, patients and visitors to the hospital as well as the adjacent university communities, Park Land users and the East End business community.
When the new hospital opens in 2016, the Royal Adelaide Hospital site will become vacant. This presents a unique opportunity to transform the site and to ensure its successful ongoing use. It is an opportunity to create a new role for this high profile site that respects and builds upon its significant cultural history and location. It’s about putting people and design at the beginning of a process, instead of at the end, and creating the future heritage of the RAH site. The site’s significance is reflected in the seven key objectives that guide this exploration.
These are:
— The site’s social significance
— Sustainable design principles
— A holistic approach to connecting the site to the city and the universities
— Extending public space into the Park Lands
— Respect for the cultural and built heritage while promoting innovative new uses
— Economic viability for the East End.
It takes many minds to imagine and shape great places. Open Ideas, the RAH site engagement process, has provided a platform for discourse, debate, creative thought and inspiration. It has explored many possibilities for the site and captured a broad range of the best ideas. The RAH Site process, led by the Office for Design and Architecture SA (ODASA) was launched on Launched from a temporary shop front in the East End by the Minister for Planning, Hon John Rau MP, the RAH Open Ideas process occurred over a six-month period, culminating in the announcement of the winners on 10 December, 2013.