While the hospital construction boom is a well-documented phenomenon, less attention has been paid to a corollary trend: an uptick in hospital demolitions.
Chicago, for its part, is moving toward its third controversial hospital demolition project in five years with the pending destruction of the Frank Cuneo Hospital for Women and Children. Cuneo Hospital, on the city's North Side, was completed in 1957 and boasted unusual architectural features, including round operating suites, a roofline that mimics an artist's palette and scads of tiny, brightly colored ceramic tiles throughout the building's exterior and interior, the Chicago Reader reports.
Closed and repurposed as a children's shelter in 1988, the hospital building is now slated for razing to make way for 800 luxury apartments and a retail complex, pending city approval of zoning changes. A group called Preservation Chicago is urging city officials to have developers save and reuse the hospital because of the unique “lyricism” of the design by its obscure-but-admired architect, Edo Belli, according to the Reader story.
Good luck with that, is all Outliers can say.
