Curbed LA has an item about the opening of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. The building, which seems to have taken about ten years to complete, is also constructed with 3 million pounds of Italian travertine. It was designed by architect I.M. Pei.
Aside from the marble and the celebrity names attached to the project, I wonder why it turned out to be so lifeless and graceless? Some of the ugliest buildings in any city seem to be hospitals, which like American health care, are expensive, overgrown, monstrous, inhuman, and ostentatiously high tech.
The Reagan Building does not look up-to-date. Its ponderous square panels, dark glass, external steel and pinkish marble belong to the “Dynasty” era of the 1980s. It is emotionless, abstract, bureaucratic, detached: a committee policy statement produced on a drafting table.
Maybe it should be renamed. Call it: “The Hillary Clinton UCLA Medical Center”.
If the architects knew then, what they know now……
Here in Van Nuys 