Designed and built for future needs
The new Stavanger University Hospital, often just called 'Nye SUS' (Nye Stavanger universitetssykehus), is the result of more than ten years of close dialogue and collaboration between Stavanger’s public health authorities and COWI as engineering consultants on all parts of the big building project in a joint venture with Nordic Office of Architecture.
Construction stage 1 of the hospital comprises 125,000 m² of buildings, which were inaugurated in November 2025. With the new hospital, the Stavanger region has future-proof health service facilities that centre on patients, their relatives and the hospital staff.
In Norway, as in other parts of Scandinavia, people are getting older. The Greater Stavanger Region in the southwest is home to 350,000 citizens, making it the country’s fourth biggest and most densely populated. Looking at a growing and ageing population, the public health authorities (Helse Stavanger HF) called for a serious upgrade of the city’s health care services.
Constructing large hospitals is a complex endeavour that requires teamplay by different disciplines and specialised skills. Since 2015, COWI, together with our partners, has worked to create a design that fulfils the high ambitions of Stavanger’s health authorities.
At COWI in Norway, we are working on similar projects in different regions, and we are looking for specialists and project managers to join our teams. Check out these open positions if you want to become part of Buildings and Industry:
Junior/Senior RIB Bergen og Haugesund
Lead Architectural Project Manager - Data Centres
Mechanical Lead - Data Centres
Senior Project Director - Data Centres
Electrical Lead - Data Centres
More than 120 contracts covering all engineering disciplines
Designing and building a hospital with hundreds of patient rooms and many rooms with special functionalities is a complex and long-lasting task. As engineering consultants on all parts of the project, COWI and Nordic Office of Architecture have been responsible for client management of more than 120 individual contracts covering all building disciplines: construction engineering, HVAC, electrical, acoustics, fire safety and environment.
To optimise the process, our ambition has been to deliver a project that was world-leading within digitalisation. Setting new standards, the project was completely paperless and fully designed in BIM.
This allowed designers to reach a high degree of standardisation and use of premade elements. For the patient rooms, the BIM model was turned into a physical test building (mock-up) to verify its robustness and actual use value. Would it work with the bathrooms made with modular walls? And what about the premade technical shafts?
High ambitions and close collaboration
Nye SUS represents a considerable improvement of the public health care in Stavanger. The new 125,000 m² modern health service facilities provide the citizens of the region with access to clinical departments with functions such as accident and emergency, outpatient clinics, laboratories, diagnostic imaging, surgery, intensive care and maternity rooms.
The goal with every design decision has been to ensure that patients, relatives and staff feel comfortable and connected to nature, indoors and outdoors. All patient rooms are orientated towards the surrounding landscape giving long views of the fjord and treetops. More intensive functions and meeting rooms are placed on the opposite side of the building, facing the courtyards.
When you work on a project for ten years, you naturally become familiar with the partners and the customer. The relationship between the main partners has been close and with a high level of trust. Everyone working on the assignment has displayed a high degree of loyalty to the project and the customer, and the interaction between engineers and architects has been close to seamless and focused on creating integrated solutions, especially between the technical disciplines.
Facts about the project
- Location: Stavanger, Norway
- Duration: 2015–2025
- Size: 125,000 m²
- Project owner: Helse Stavanger HF
- Partners: Nordic Office of Architecture
- COWI engagement: all engineering consultancy services for the finished hospital, including BIM, structural engineering, HVAC and industrial building solutions
- named The World’s Best Digital Building Project by Autodesk in 2018
Construction stage 2 - The second and final stage of Nye SYS, which will add another 115,000 m² of buildings to the hospital, is planned to be completed in 2040.
For me, Nye SUS has been both challenging and educational. COWI has strong hospital expertise and has built up a lot of experience within hospitals, healthcare and the pharma industry.
“To be the leading experts in hospitals, we have started an internal 'hospital school' where advisors with extensive hospital experience are matched with younger engineers skilled in BIM and digitalisation. The young will shape the hospitals of the future, but they need guidance from the experienced hospital planners.
With this culture of collaboration, learning and development between disciplines, we work fully integrated, close to the architect and, of course, the customer. It leads to a flow of improvements that may seem individually small, but together, they add up to significant lifts, not just in how we work with hospitals but with big buildings and construction in general.”
Tom Daniel Berg Enger, Project Manager
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