C. William Brubaker via Flickr user UIC Digital Collections

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AD Classics: Prentice Women's Hospital / Bertrand Goldberg

This article was originally published on September 28, 2013. To read the stories behind other celebrated architecture projects, visit our AD Classics section.

Hospital buildings, with their high standards of hygiene and efficiency, are a restrictive brief for architects, who all too often end up designing uninspiring corridors of patient rooms constructed from a limited palette of materials. However, this was not the case in Bertrand Goldberg's 1975 Prentice Women's Hospital. The hospital is the best example of a series of Goldberg-designed medical facilities, which all adhere to a similar form: a tower containing rooms for patient care, placed atop a rectilinear plinth containing the hospital's other functions.

AD Classics: Prentice Women's Hospital / Bertrand Goldberg - Hospital , Facade, Arch, CityscapeAD Classics: Prentice Women's Hospital / Bertrand Goldberg - Hospital , Beam, Arch, FacadeAD Classics: Prentice Women's Hospital / Bertrand Goldberg - Hospital , Facade, CityscapeAD Classics: Prentice Women's Hospital / Bertrand Goldberg - Hospital , FacadeAD Classics: Prentice Women's Hospital / Bertrand Goldberg - More Images+ 2

Read on for more about this masterwork of humanist brutalism...

Three Firms Shortlisted to Design Prentice Successor

Shortly after confirming the demise of Bertrand Goldberg’s beloved Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago, Northwestern has released a shortlist of three firms competing to design the school’s new biomedical research facility. This comes with the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and despite strong backlash from architects and preservationists worldwide.

The finalists are: