A children's hospital with its own healing properties

From patient 'cottages' to walls designed for scribbling on, the Kinderspital in Zurich is a child-friendly miracle

- Oliver Wainwright

'Hospitals are the ugliest places in the world," said Jacques Herzog. "They are a product of blind functionalist thinking, while neglecting basic human needs." The Swiss architect has a point. With their low ceilings, windowless corridors and harsh fluorescent lighting, hospitals can seem consciously calibrated to make you feel ill, if you didn't already. Attempts to jolly them up with coloured cladding panels and art commissions do little to distract from the bleak reality of buildings where the human experience - for patients, doctors and visitors alike - is often an afterthought.

Herzog insists it doesn't have to be like this. And he has proof. He is standing in the circular entrance courtyard of his practice's stunning riposte to the last century of grim healthcare buildings. It is a tranquil space reminiscent of a sylvan spa complex, ringed with sculpted wooden slats and planted with tall trees and ferns, where light bounces off marble sculptures. A broad gallery deck encircles the floor above, where bedrooms spill out on to wide, daylit corridors. Entering through revolving pink glass doors, you find a concrete staircase spiralling down into the foyer, curling around a core of colourful neon tubes that look ready to beam you upstairs.

Welcome to Zurich's new children's hospital, the Kinderspital - or "Kispi" for short-a 14-year endeavour to revolutionise the architecture of healing. It is not trying to be a fancy hotel, like some private hospitals with their plush carpets and room service. It is just a place where simple things like the quality of light and views and the texture of materials have been thought about with immense care.