Prentice Women's Hospital, Chicago, Perspective

For almost 30 years Bertrand Goldberg’s architecture practice focused on hospitals and medical centers, redefining the design of healthcare and research facilities. In the 1960s his experiments in designing the Affiliated Hospitals in Boston and Stanford University Medical Center led to a new form of spatial organization, one that combined rectilinear-base buildings for common services and supplies with geocentric towers for beds and other areas for treating patients. Goldberg arrived at his ideal architectural model in 1971 with the Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago, in which a soaring, concrete structure organized patient rooms into floors of radial or village-like clusters to promote efficient nursing care.

The logic that Goldberg articulated throughout each of his healthcare projects introduced radical ways of understand- ing how space negotiates demanding technological needs, interpersonal relationships, and the individual human body. His pioneering work informed a number of specialized medical projects in the United States, Turkey, and Yemen.