Through the dialectic of illness and repair, this project explores methods of conservation at the scale of a city. A hospital for both bodies and buildings, the project treats an array of ailments which at times overlap in surreal and theatrical operations, subverting expectations of scale and occupation. Through performative rituals of maintenance and care across concrete, flesh, steel, and bones, the hospital is a site of remediation and restoration.

The project proposes alternative narratives for Kiruna – an architecturally and ecologically traumatised mining city in northern Sweden – to explore notions of everyday heritage. While the slow-motion condemnation of Kiruna’s buildings haunts its future and questions its past, the Hospital seeks to mediate between these two timescales by providing restorative treatment, whether that be in the form of structural repair, hydrotherapy, or the suturing of obsolescence.

Centred around a stage-like operating (amphi)theatre, the hospital also functions as a place of debate where unlikely groups of people come together to discuss alternatives to Kiruna’s heritage including builders, conservators, surgeons, politicians, miners, and locals.