Aaron Betsky’s Criticism of Architecture

Neither the Cedars-Sinai complex of buildings, nor its staff, nor its directors and governors and least of all its patients deserve the trite, uncalled-for piece of academic detritus that passed for a review on Nov. 5.

I’ve been reading architectural criticism, sometimes of my own work, for almost 50 years. Never before have I witnessed such an untimely, gratuitous and unqualified diatribe.

I hold no brief, one way or the other for the talent of the A. C. Martin firm and I feel similarly about Rochlin, Baron & Balbone. We’ve all seen better building complexes and we’ve all seen worse. The arbitrary attack on the dignity of an almost 20-year-old complex seems bizarre and capricious.

Your pedagogical temerity to suggest that a medical center isn’t a medical center unless it has “uplifting, do-gooder Gothic arches” or “optimistic modernistic lines” or “sanitary red brick with white trim” is less than comical. It is also unbecoming behavior for an architectural critic of a major newspaper.

Isn’t Cedars fortunate that it can entertain an architectural critic with the sound and fury of an imaginative “battle” between the “proliferation of medical technology with the bland walls and pasty materials.” Wow! What malarkey!

Was it some personal bitterness that prompted your critic to throw such an undeserved barrage of verbal stones?

LAWRENCE LERNER

Beverly Hills