Northwestern
University Medical School’s shuttered Prentice Women’s Hospital on the city’s
central lakeshore campus of the University may be considered a thing of beauty
by architecture buffs, but the controversy over what to do with the outdated
shell, empty for the last 5 years, is getting very ugly. The University wants
to tear down the structure and replace it on the high priced lakefront site
with a modern medical research facility. Preservationist groups and
architecture aficionados claim the existing shell can be adapted to research
use, and that this early example of groundbreaking hospital configuration –
four open plan “villages of care” on each floor – should be kept around for
posterity.
Designed
by Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg, the Prentice Women’s building is ranked
11 on the National Trust for Historic Places list of most endangered buildings
worth preserving. Goldberg’s 1970’s design has since been emulated by hospitals
all across the country, in efforts to humanize and sensitize interaction
between patients and caregivers in the hospital setting. Sixty prominent
architects have petitioned Mayor Rahm Emanuel to force the University to save
the structure, and Mayor Emanuel has punted the issue over to Landmarks
Commission chairman Rafael Leon. Northwestern has agreed to delay demolition
plans until the Landmarks Commission holds a hearing on the matter, yet
chairman Leon refuses to put the issue on his agenda, further delaying a
resolution.
The
hospital campus, situated on the city’s prime Gold Coast lakefront just north
of Navy Pier, is the site of ongoing high priced construction projects funded
by some very generous benefactors, whose names now adorn the facades of the
hospital structures they have funded. Controversy over these developments, and
the congestion they cause neighborhood residents, is nothing new – one of the
latest contretemps involved the helicopter landing pad atop the new Lurie Children’s
Hospital. The University needs to restore the empty Prentice site to useful
purposes. Anyone who forgets that Mayor Emanuel is a Northwestern grad school
class of 1985 alumnus is missing the point.
