An unrepentant behemoth from our Brutalist friends Warner, Burns, Toan and Lunde. By this point they've punted the gray stone cladding (so often mistaken for concrete anyway) in favor of a Big Steel vocabulary which in the 1970s perhaps still conveyed the vigor of industry and by extension, medicine-appropriate "technology." I'll get to New York's most daring "industrial" hospital in due course, but for now I'll just pause to note this particular late-Modern style. The emphasis on cross-bracing, ventilation for the mechanical floors, and exposed weathering steel - not to mention the very abstract form - put it as far out of touch as possible from contemporary medical architecture. I like this better, but as of this writing I'm not a hospital patient, employee, or visitor.
Were I to take ill, I might conceivably prefer today's comforts and amenities, though when you get down to it, the cores of these things are always going to be technically-driven mazes of corridors, lit and ventilated artificially and with no living walls or acoustically-dampening waterfalls in sight. These 1970s buildings - and here I have to mention my favorite from Chicago - seemed less shy about the nakedly purpose-driven goal: HEALING MANUFACTURED HERE. Whether healing might require or at least be supplemented by a contradictory set of forces (familiarity, comfort, the joy of green growing things) seems not to have made it in there. The intellectually more eclectic early modernists may have had it right all along; compare to Paimio (text) (photos).
In the foreground: the Fort Washington Avenue Armory (Richard Walker and Charles Morris, 1907-1911).
