Clover-shaped Chicago Building on the Verge of Destruction

August 17, 2012 • Commentary • by

Completed in 1975 in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood, the Prentice Women’s Hospital seems too new to be considered a historic building, but a pending demolition has preservationists up in arms. Architect Bertrand Goldberg, who is more famous for designing the nearby Marina City’s twin “corncob” towers, spent over three years designing the hospital and left behind an important piece of modern architecture.

From a functional standpoint, Goldberg first wanted to bring doctors and nurses into closer contact with patients, which meant housing patients in round “pods” rather than along right-angled corridors. Second, he wanted to eliminate blind spots caused by support columns, so he designed the building so that its structural supports were distributed between its central support, which housed the elevators and nurse’s station on each floor, and its curvy concrete shell. This gave the building a floor plan that allowed for high visibility and flexibility.

In a recent article in Vantity Fair, Paul Goldberger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic and writer for The New Yorker, attributes great architectural significance to the Prentice building and has calls for its preservation. He writes,

It’s a key building in the history of structural engineering, and its unusual form, a poured-concrete cantilevered shell, has few if any equals in modern engineering. Almost nothing else looks like this building, and in a world of carbon-copy architecture, its loopy, futuristic curves are unique: a concrete rocket ship amid Chicago’s glass boxes. A little weird, yes, but the more you look at it, the more you like it. More significant still, it’s an exceptionally important building in the evolution of health-care design, incorporating new ideas about the connection between architecture and childbirth. The cloverleaf plan was intended to create “quiet villages” of patient rooms, encouraging family-oriented childbirth, one of the first times this idea was essential to a hospital’s design. Beyond making health-care history, Prentice made architectural technology history, too: it was designed using an early form of computer modeling, making it, in effect, a guinea pig for the digital systems by which almost everything is now designed.

Northwestern University, the building’s owner, has talked of tearing down the now outdated building for months to make way for a new research building, but preservationists want to keep the quartrefoil (that’s “clover-shaped”) icon around, even if it means repurposing it into a hotel or offices. For Goldberger, the either-or proposition of new development and historical preservation is an unnecessary one. He writes, “Chicago, in this instance, could have both, since it’s possible to preserve Prentice for a new use and still allow Northwestern to expand its facilities. It just takes some imagination. And that’s just what seems lacking right now in the nation’s first city of architecture.”

If you’re interested in the preservation of this building, here’s what you can do to help:

Write: a letter to city officials in support of reuse of the building.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel
Office of the Mayor
City Hall
City of Chicago
121 N. LaSalle St.
Chicago, IL 60602
[email protected]
-
Alderman Brendan Reilly
Office of the 42nd Ward
325 W. Huron, Suite 510
Chicago IL, 60654
Ph 312.642.4242
Fax 312.642.0420
[email protected]
-
Join: the Save Prentice Facebook page at SavePrentice.org.
Sign: the Save Prentice Hospital Petition.

Attribution

“Paul Goldberger on the Fight to Save Chicago’s Prentice Hospital,” Paul Goldberger, Vanity Fair

Images from Chicago Modern

Commentary Ticker

  • Different Strokes for Different Folks: How Masturbation Divides Us
    May 24, 2013 | 7:10 pm

    Without a doubt, the vast majority of people will engage in masturbation over the course of their lifetimes. May, even, is National Masturbation Month. Yet self-pleasure still remains a divisive issue, as it has for some time, and moreover, the question of its role forms the basis for much of the cultural divide in our [...]

  • You Think You’re So Pretty: What Dove’s ‘Sketches’ Video Got Wrong
    May 23, 2013 | 5:02 pm

    “I should be more grateful of my natural beauty” one woman concludes after participating in the Dove Beauty Sketches. In fact, the woman, Florence concludes that natural beauty “couldn’t be more critical to your happiness.” Florence came to these undesirable conclusions through participation in a commercial released as part of Dove’s campaign to promote “real [...]

  • The Story of the Slurpee
    May 21, 2013 | 5:37 pm

    It might surprise you to hear that the Slurpee was an accident. Yet the beloved concoction, as a matter of fact, got its start when a Dairy Queen soda machine kept on malfunctioning. Its operator, Omar Knedlik of Kansas City, placed bottles of soda in his freezer as a failsafe. The bottles came out a [...]

  • We Are More Germ Than Human
    May 16, 2013 | 11:50 pm

    The human body is one of the most fascinating and puzzling ecosystems in the universe, a complex community of cells, germs and microbes that is still being mapped and decoded. Recent discoveries in this field have caused scientists to reevaluate the way we look at our internal functions, and perhaps we aren’t as much ourselves [...]

  • Daft Punk Streams New Album ‘Random Access Memories’
    May 13, 2013 | 1:42 pm

    The robots are back. The internet has been abuzz with hype for Daft Punk’s long awaited follow up to 2005′s Human After All, and today we finally get to hear it. While the official release date is still a week away, iTunes is offering fans the chance to stream all 13 tracks early. Simply follow [...]

  • RSSArchive for Commentary Ticker »

Trending on The Airspace