Prentice Women's Hospital (1974), Chicago, Illinois

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Prentice Women's Hospital (1974)
Designer Bertrand Goldberg
Location Chicago, Illinois, USA
Date 1972 to 1974
Building Type Hospital
Construction System Cast-in-place concrete
Climate Cold Temperate
Context Urban
Architectural Style Modern
Street Address 333 E. Superior St. Walk Score
Notes Vacant since 2007, when the women's hospital relocated to a new structure.

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Building Details
Client Northwestern Memorial Hospital
Area 340,150 square feet (gross, including basement and mechanical levels); typical tower floor: 17,250 square feet
Stories 13
Awards  


This building's form, like other works by Bertrand Goldberg, is primarily a multi-lobed tower. This egalitarian approach to building design organizes equivalent programmatic elements radially around a complex central structural and service core. In this case, the building's quatrefoil plan combines four semicircles to resemble a simplified clover leaf.

The curvaceous tower's rectilinear core projects upward from a multistory, rectangular base building, leaving perhaps three stories of open space before the cantilevered, four-lobed plan is fully expressed. The base of each lobe is formed as a continuous concrete arch that curves in three dimensions as it springs vertically from the tower's base, and transitions gradually toward horizotonality at its apex. At each of four corners, adjacent arches cross their neighbors, their intersection creating a form reminiscent of an elongated pendentive.

The center of each floor of the bed tower is organized around circular space comprising nurses station and support rooms. This central circle is enclosed within a larger square zone that defines a continuous circulation space.

Each corner of the square is aligned with the entry to one of four lobes, each defined by one semicircle of the exterior quatrefoil. At the midpoint of each edge of the circulation square is one of four service cores: two opposite cores contain elevators and HVAC shafts, while the remaining two cores each house a stairwell and other centralized services for the floor.

Each of the four semicircular lobes was organized as an independent hospital ward. At the center of each half-circle ward is a glazed nursery, separated from the patient rooms by a faceted corridor.

Seven patient rooms and a storage space -- eight divisions in all -- occupy the outer two thirds of the semicircle and are organized radially around the ward's corridor and nursery. Each patient room includes a small vanity and a small bathroom with a toilet and shower.



In plan, the outter two thirds of each semicircle is divided radially into eight equal spaces. In the inner third, a faceted corridor inner third Seven of the eight spaces are


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"Endangered American Places", by ArchitectureWeek, ArchitectureWeek No. 524, 2011.0720, pN1.2.

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