By Susie Cribbs

If the breathtaking coastal stretch of Mumbai, India, is called the "Queen's Necklace," you could say that Parag Parekh (A'94) designed its architectural jewel. Towering 175 feet above the Arabian Sea, Saifee Hospital dwarfs Mumbai's coastal skyline. Windows spaced generously across 10 stories reflect the sun, while inside nearly 700 of India's top medical professionals go about the business of saving lives. Its white-and peach-colored exterior contrasts with the dark buildings clustered around it, as if announcing to the world that this is indeed the home of health care on the Indian coast.


Inaugurated last June, the $35 million Saifee Hospital in Mumbai was the brainchild of the 52nd Dai al-Mutlaq Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin, who leads the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community. Parekh designed the facility, which fuses the client's emotional aspirations and Islamic design icons with the flexibility, technology and adaptability required of any hospital design.

Tasked with making the building a "shining symbol of hospital design" and a "most beautiful pendant" in the Queen's Necklace, Parekh and his team found inspiration in the beauty of the region and the principles of Fatimid architecture, which relies heavily on the use of projected portals and domes, keel-shaped arches, stucco decoration and iconographic inscriptions. They combined these ideals with more contemporary techniques to create a building that is both modern and traditional.

"We wanted to create a physical setting that soothes the emotional stresses of disorientation, isolation, fear, pain and powerlessness that patients commonly experience in hospitals," Parekh said.

With this goal in mind, Parekh's team designed a hospital whose interior provides light and comfort to patients. Xenon lights replicate sunlight in its operating rooms, and this hospital is the first in the Asia-Pacific region to use beds that allow patients to adjust the backrest, head and knee-break with the touch of a button. Saifee also is the first hospital in Mumbai to include fiber-optic cables for high-speed data transfer, a complete physiotherapy rehabilitation center and an in-house water treatment facility that meets World Health Organization standards for potable water.


While the hospital's interior empowers patients and offers the best in modern health care, the exterior is just as impressive. Parekh notes that the building's exterior was the most important challenge.

"The elevation is designed so that, with just a glance at the building, the eye yearns to stop and linger," Parekh said.

Although Parekh drew inspiration for the project from the region's architectural traditions and the site of the hospital, he says that the design would not have been the same without the strong interdisciplinary education he received at Carnegie Mellon.

"Working on this project involved focusing simultaneously on the architecture, interiors and the medical planning,” he said. “The multi-tasking approach to problem solving that I learned at Carnegie Mellon has helped me to manage all of these aspects, and is what I believe contributed most in the ultimate success of this project."