![]() ![]() The Prentice Women's Hospital and Maternity Center in Chicago, which opened in 1975, was a unique version of this style with four radial towers. These include the Lorain Community Hospital (Lorain, Ohio), the Scott & White Memorial Hospital (Temple, Texas), and the Central Kansas Medical Center (Great Bend, Kansas). Fine have noted that there are a few other examples of multistory “radial” layouts in the United States, all built in 1964–1965. Hospital architecture scholars Stephen Verderber and David J. But these facilities were never meant to be more than one or two stories tall. Predecessors to this design were a never-built Kaiser Permanente geodesic-dome-based facility from 1957, followed by the “Atomedic Hospital,” which originated in the early 1960s. The towers were part of an ever-expanding hospital that had been on the same site since 1898 and were inspired, in part, by the towers of the preexisting structure. Saint Joseph Hospital Communications Manager Colleen Magorian added these details: The Saint Joseph Hospital “twin towers” were dedicated in 1964, so they were just more than 50 years old when our new hospital opened. Old and new Saint Joseph hospitals, circa 1964 It looked more like an overhead view of the Starship Enterprise than a pair of binoculars. The workflow logic was identical, and the main differences were the stairwell, lobby placement, and lack of an external balcony. Saint Joseph is one of them.Īlthough there’s no firm evidence that the Saint Joseph design was influenced by Panorama City, it’s surely not a coincidence. It was the venerable Saint Joseph Hospital, and what I noticed immediately was that it had two paired cylindrical (or “radial”) towers, just like our former Panorama City hospital, a design universally described as “binoculars.” But taller.Įven though the Kaiser Permanente Health Plan has been operating in Colorado since 1969, and has built numerous state-of-the-art medical office buildings, it has always contracted with local facilities for hospital space. When I was touring Denver’s Kaiser Permanente facilities in late 2016, my host pointed out a hospital that was being demolished. Saint Joseph Hospital, Denver, circa 1970
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