Project Name: Wave 4 & 5 – ECR Health Care Complex

Location: Sopot, Poland

Architecture Practice: FAAB

Total Floor Area: 4,744 m²

Completion: 2025

Photography: Jakub Certowicz

Design Features: Located just 400 metres from the Baltic Sea in Sopot, Poland, the Wave 4 and 5 buildings of the ECR Health Care Complex by Warsaw-based studio FAAB represent a decisive shift in how healthcare architecture can function as a therapeutic instrument. Completed in 2025, the 4,744-square-metre project accommodates an analytical laboratory, outpatient clinic, day surgery hospital, and specialist hospital, all united beneath a cohesive architectural language rooted in the healing potential of the natural world.

FAAB drew inspiration from Pierre Carreau’s AquaViva photography series, translating the fluid geometry of close-up seascapes into undulating upper volumes and sculptural entrance canopies that immediately distinguish the complex from the sterile typology of conventional medical facilities. The most striking element of the facade is its perforated aluminium cladding, patterned after the Flower of Life, an ancient symbol of healing recurring across Egyptian, Indian, and Mayan civilisations. The perforation flows seamlessly across flat panels, variable-geometry surfaces, and window shutters alike, calibrated through 1:1 physical models to balance daylighting, privacy, and summer solar control simultaneously.

Inside, clinical infrastructure is deliberately concealed. Nurse call systems and medical technology are absorbed into the interior decor, ensuring patients are never confronted with visual cues of illness. Each of the 44 patient rooms is individually characterised by colour, bespoke FAAB-designed furniture, and a unique handmade wicker light shade crafted by Polish artist Jacek Wydrzyński, a gesture of personalisation rarely seen at this scale in healthcare design.

The project also reclaimed five hectares of long-neglected brownfield land, transforming a former informal dumping ground into a Seaside Garden planted entirely with native species, reconnecting Dolny Sopot to the city’s existing green belt and opening a previously inaccessible public green corridor.

Design Team: Founded in 2003 by Adam Białobrzeski and Adam Figurski, following five years of professional experience at practices both in Poland and abroad, FAAB has grown into one of Warsaw’s most rigorous and methodologically driven architectural studios. Operating across architecture, landscape and urban design, interior design, and graphic design, and supported by cutting-edge engineering and consultancy, the practice approaches each commission through exhaustive research and precise design development, consistently producing built work of formal and functional distinction.

Co-founders Adam Białobrzeski and Adam Figurski lead the studio alongside a Creative Director, together overseeing the long-term strategic and creative direction of the office. Under their leadership, FAAB has realised significant civic, cultural, and healthcare projects across Poland, including the Foundation for Polish Science headquarters in Warsaw, the PGE office building in Bełchatów, and the ongoing ECR Health Care Complex in Sopot.  

Each project at FAAB is developed by a dedicated team structured around a lead architect responsible for project management, supported by project architects and a broad network of external specialists across multiple disciplines. This collaborative model, grounded in what the studio describes as curiosity, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of perfection, enables FAAB to respond to the evolving demands of contemporary built environments with both intellectual depth and material precision.