Prefabricated hospital

A hospital whose internal walls are LiteSpan panel. Technopol's record of the job is twelve photographs and nothing else, so this study says what the photographs show and stops there. The facility is not named here because nothing in the frames names it.

What the sequence shows is a wall that arrives finished. Photograph 7 is the erection stage: white steel-faced panels standing full height on a plywood deck, seated in a light steel floor track, under a bolted steel frame still open to the sky, with a window already trimmed into one of them and a galvanised duct hanging off the steel above. Photograph 8 looks down the length of the same deck at a row of rooms taking shape — an external corner where the panel's cut edge reads as a thin tan line, a vertical steel strap over a joint, and white plumbing stubs standing on the next wall lines before those walls exist.

Photograph 3 is that same wall finished. The corridor runs away between two unbroken pale walls whose only lines are the panel joints, about a metre apart, with the doors set flush into the panel line. There is no plaster on that wall, no board over it, no skim and no paint. The factory skin is the finish, and the wall went from bare panel standing on the deck to the finished corridor below without a wet trade in between.

That is the whole argument for the panel in this building type, and it is worth being precise about why a hospital is where it lands hardest. A plastered blockwork partition is built wet, left to dry, made good and then painted, and every one of those steps is dust, water and time inside a building that is supposed to be clean. Here the surface that left the factory is the surface a patient looks at.

Photograph 1 is the test of that claim rather than the easy case. It is an en-suite shower room, and the walls are the bare panel face — glass enclosure, WC and basin fixed straight to it, a window cut through it, and tiling on the floor only. The unlined factory skin is accepted as the wet-room wall.

Photograph 11 shows the wall doing the other job a hospital wall has to do. A timber bedhead board is screwed to the panel carrying a bank of service outlets and two handsets; there is a basin on a projecting service panel, a split unit above, a blind in the window opening, and a green finish applied to the panel to about bed height. Photograph 4 shows where all of it comes from: the same corridor before its ceilings went in, with ducts, pipe runs, light battens and insulation crossing the zone left open above the panel heads.

What this study does not tell you, because the photographs cannot: which facility this is, where it is, how big it is, when it was built, how quickly it went up, and what the panel's thickness, core, steel gauge or coating were — nor any fire, acoustic or thermal rating. Those are questions for Technopol, not for a photograph.