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 
I agree with you. I’m shocked that it’s new. It looks very 1987. I actually had similar feelings about the new Getty museum when it opened a few years ago. The white grid structure looked about 10 years out of date to me, and yet they made such a big deal out of it and the architect (Richard Meier). I guess it’s nice, but no masterpiece. Of course, this hospital is much worse looking, but I guess a hospital is harder to do creatively than a museum.
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I’ve walked by there a few times since starting my new job, and for the most part it’s a nice building, if a bit unimaginative. Part of the problem is that space is so limited that the hospital can’t help but be a big box. I can understand the Ronald Reagan Medical Center looking a bit drab, but for the Mattel Children’s Hospital section should look a lot more whimsical and inviting.
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Yeah, I’m not saying you are wrong just premature. I’d like to see how the insides work as a hospital and building and semi-public space. I’ve never been a big IM Pei fan anyway but at least his stuff works and acknowleges that a budget exists somewhere.
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Yeah, I know…form follows function. I’m just asking for a little more form.
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Hold off on the glass and steel box complaints. Hospitals are complex machines with very strict medical, safety and other considerations. Giving patients a window is part of their getting better for but one consideration.
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