Expanding Hospitals Vertically 

Bringing outpatient care and surgery into a tightly planned coastal site in Mumbai 

Breach Candy Hospital has added an 11-storey tower to its Mumbai campus, increasing capacity while continuing to care for patients throughout construction.  Located within Mumbai’s dense coastal fabric and abutting the Arabian Sea, the tower has been positioned with surgical precision on a constrained site, part of a wider redevelopment of the private hospital.  The new building provides 84 inpatient beds, 13 outpatient departments and two operating theatres designed for robotic surgery.  

The project faced a challenge familiar to older city hospitals across the world: how to expand on a restricted site without interrupting the work of the existing hospital.  The tower was built next to Breach Candy’s established Art Deco complex, with construction taking place under infection-control requirements.  

The layout addresses the demands of delivering care across several floors, according to project consultants Edifice.  The planning framework prioritises patient safety, clinical efficiency, and logistical clarity within a live medical environment.  Clinical functions are stacked and zoned to optimise adjacent clinical locations: outpatient departments and surgical facilities are placed lower in the building, where they can be reached more directly.  Inpatient and critical care areas sit above them.   

The tower also includes a seventh floor designed for isolation and conversion during a future public health emergency.  Breach Candy’s then chief executive told Hindustan Times in 2023 that the pandemic had exposed the lack of isolation wards in the older building.  The infrastructure enables rapid isolation and controlled circulation, while also allowing quick conversion in response to unexpected public health emergencies. 

The interiors draw on the hospital’s Art Deco roots and Mumbai’s coastal context, creating a visible connection to the older campus.  Curved forms and restrained coastal colours reference both the hospital’s early 20th century character and its seafront location.  Colour is also used to help people find their way around the building and the design reduces the noise and harsh lighting that can make a hospital visit more stressful – fabric ceilings diffuse the light, while acoustic treatments are intended to reduce noise in patient and waiting areas. 

Separate routes for patients, staff and services are intended to limit congestion and unnecessary movement between clinical areas.  Hospital infection-control committee minutes show that staff considered how waste and dirty linen would move through the tower.  They agreed to use a dumbwaiter exclusively for biomedical waste and to carry dirty linen in closed containers in the lifts outside peak and visiting hours. 

Breach Candy’s expansion illustrates the pressures facing established urban hospitals that need more space and updated facilities but cannot pause services to rebuild.  The project demonstrates how contemporary healthcare infrastructure can be embedded within historic institutional campuses through precise planning in an architecturally sensitive solution.