A forensic review into the crisis-hit Queen Elizabeth University Hospital could take months to carry out and may never uncover the reasons for three serious infections in patients.

One of the country’s most prominent medical architects said due to the scale of the site and the level of detail needed, it would take “many months” to conduct the probe announced by the Scottish Government this week.

Christopher Shaw, chairman of campaign group Architects for Health and founder of the medical planning firm Medical Architecture, said parts of the facility could be closed down to conduct the inquiry, but insisted the site was “not untherapeutic”.

Shaw, who visited the site in Glasgow during its construction, added that due to the custom design of the one-off building, it was possible issues or details might have been overlooked.

He said: “A building that size is a very complex machine and [the Cryptococcus infection from bird droppings] will be [related to] a relationship between the design of the building, the engineering systems of the building and the commissioning and operation of those things.

“New hospitals of that scale are not like iPhones or products we buy. There aren’t prototypes to follow, they’ve been designed and built as a one-off.

“Due to the craft nature by which these buildings are built, things can slip through those interactions between the design, the engineering, the commissioning and the operation of the building.

“In Scotland though, there are particularly rigorous buildings standards and there is a good team overseeing these.”

Shaw has been involved in forensic reviews of buildings previously, and is currently conducting one in a central London hospital where the air quality outside the building has been found to be a risk to patients.

He said the process at the QEUH is likely to take “many months” and added: “I don’t think anybody should underestimate how complicated it is.

“You’re really looking at very small particles moving through the air, interacting with systems and people and light. There are all sorts of things that can affect hazards in the air.

“If you identify something that is a particular risk you close that bit of the hospital down, and at the moment it seems that the risks are difficult to pin down at the Queen Elizabeth.

“The hospital is a big complicated machine and we have the interaction of a lot of things here.

“In any forensic review role, you have to have an open mind. You have to listen to what people think has happened.

“I wouldn’t want to preclude that it’s specifically a design or operational issue but I would point out it’s unusual and rare and unfortunate that these patients have died. You really feel for the parents and families, you can’t not be touched by that.”

Shaw’s comments come as one of Scotland’s top architects described the site, which is the size of 11 football pitches, as “grossly unhappy” and said the basic principles of healthcare had been ignored.

Malcolm Fraser also added that the design of the facility had been “frowned upon” among architects in Scotland for some time since it was unveiled.

He said: “It was called the death star for a reason. It’s not a happy place.”

Fraser added: “It’s not well-liked in the industry, let’s put it that way. It’s called the death star for a reason. There is a happy medium between large facilities and more devolved local facilities and the QEUH is massive – it is the largest hospital campus in Europe.

“It does seem like Scotland’s gone down the route of a aggrandisement of these facilities, lumping them all together with only multinational contractors big enough to build them and international design consultancies big enough to design them.”

Fraser, whose designs include the Scottish Poetry Library and Scottish Ballet’s Glasgow headquarters, said any review should not only look at the building itself but how well it promotes recovery among patients.

He said: “Glasgow has been knocking down all these buildings they say are not conducive to wellbeing, and then building a hospital that is 12 storeys high and massive. It’s a very odd thing.

“The Victorians could get it right, so why can’t we? I can recall lying in a bed in the old Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh and I could open the window and get fresh air, sunlight came into the room and I could see trees and The Meadows park out of the window. It has now been objectively proven that people recover much quicker in such situations.

“It’s not an inkling – it’s worth billions to the health service and the economy. People can back to work quicker, they can get out of hospital.

“We have a tendency to get technocratic about lots of stuff and forget about the simplicities.

“For example, these buildings are always mechanically ventilated instead of naturally ventilated. That has almost been forced on designers.

“I’m not saying hospital environments don’t need mechanical ventilation for specific tasks but for general wards and recovery we should look towards much simpler means.

“As a society we do have the tendency to spend more on kit to try to solve problems rather than breaking them down and looking at how to do things more simply and more healthily.”

When it was built, the 170,000 square-metre superhospital had heating and ventilation pumps installed which it was claimed could save up to £1 million a year, as well as reducing carbon emissions by up to 20%.

Fraser argued that too much focus may have been placed on hi-tech solutions, and not enough on the basic functions the hospital needed to perform. He said: “If you look at buildings in a technical way instead of a holistic, healthy way, then you can overlook things.

“Part of the problem here is that mechanical ventilation ducts have been a way to pick up pigeon diseases and push them around a building.

“Instead of opening a window to get air in, you move air in through intakes of big fans and they put ducts around the building, pre-heat it and pre-cool it and feed it into individual rooms so you don’t have to open the window.

“It is more expensive, and in health terms it’s not as good and here it has this knock-on effect of spreading diseases around the building.”

The hospital was designed by British architects’ firm Nightingale Associates, which was then bought by Canadian outfit IBI Group.

The firm said it has not been contacted by the Scottish Government yet about the review, but a spokeswoman said: “IBI Group is saddened to hear about the recent news at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and we express our condolences to those families impacted.

“We have not yet been contacted, but if we are, we will fully assist the Health Secretary and the Queen Elizabeth project team.”

The spokeswoman added: “In light of the inquiry now in progress, we do not feel it would be appropriate to provide further comment on matters related to the inquiry at this time.”