The Maimonides Hospital was designed
and built in San Francisco in 1950 by
one of the great architects of classic
Modernism, Erich Mendelsohn. The
Hospital ward faces south and overlooks
an intimate beautiful courtyard protected
from the noisy street by the Administration
front building. Ample terraces with
grateful balconies were the most
characteristic features of this sober and
elegant building.
Regrettably, a new Hospital director,
appointed after the building was already
finished, decided to reduce the size of the terraces
and to make major alterations on the main
ward facade composition without consulting
Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn was
terribly disappointed because he had even
offered his professional services as design
consulting free of charge before the renovation
were done.
Much more recently, in the 1990's a next
door medical building was built. The
architect decided to replicate the grateful
curves of the balconies with a ridiculously
gigantic bow window that occupies several
floor along the side facade. The out-of-scale
new high-tech building reacts with the serene
and harmonic Maimonides Hospital as an
elephant inside a delicate porcelain store
would do. I am convinced the architect of
that new building wanted to establish an
architectural "dialogue" between both structures,
but I truly believe that it is always good to
remember the old German proverb "Speaking
comes by nature, silence by understanding"
is there an address for the hospital?
ReplyDeleteBush and Divisadero Streets
DeleteReally? "Serene and harmonic"? "Sober and elegant"?
ReplyDeleteI always saw the Maimonides Hospital building as a generic concrete box with some semi-circular balconies grafted onto one side, and a row of gimmicky portholes cut into the other. It has all of the charm of the old Jack Tar Hotel, that hideous Holiday Inn on Van Ness, or Fontana Towers.
And it was a brutal imposition into a neighborhood of 2 and 3-storey Victorians when it was built; utterly out of scale or context with its surroundings. Of course, since then the neighborhood has been subjected to dozens of hideous new mid-rises, but it was the Maimonides that begin this aesthetically ruinous trend.