UCLA Hospital to Blend Medicine With Aesthetics

UCLA will announce its largest construction project ever today when it unveils plans to replace its earthquake-damaged medical center with a complex designed under the direction of world-renowned architect I.M. Pei.

The $1.1-billion project of more than 1.7 million square feet is being billed by the school as the ultimate marriage of medicine, technology, seismic safety and aesthetics--a facility that will offer cutting-edge care in a complex beautiful enough to serve as the new Westwood Village gate into the university campus.

“This is one of the first attempts by any hospital to get an architect who can do something inspirational for patients,” said Assistant Vice Chancellor Sarah Meeker Jensen, an architect and the complex’s project manager. “Up to this point, the medical technology has so much driven hospital design that there has been no room for architecture.”

Even as they outline the project, which is expected to begin next year and be completed in 2010, university officials are also launching a fund-raising campaign to raise $300 million in private funds during the first phase of the project alone.

The fund-raising effort, which already has amassed $100 million, is being led by Michael Ovitz, the former Creative Artists Agency and Walt Disney Co. executive, who pledged $25 million to rebuild the complex, and supermarket magnate Ron Burkle. Pei designed CAA’s Beverly Hills headquarters while Ovitz was the company’s leader.

“I think people in L.A. are incredibly charitable,” Ovitz said. “We’re confident that we can meet our goal or we wouldn’t be doing it.”

The university also has $432 million in construction funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency--less than half of the money it requested for repairing the earthquake damage to its medical facilities--and $44 million in state funds.

In an interview Monday, Pei said he believes a building can be designed to make people feel better, a notion central to his ideas about planning a hospital.

“It has to be a pleasant place to be,” Pei said. “I’ve been to hospitals like everybody else, and I’ve always wondered why hospitals have to be so grim. I think we have an opportunity to change that here.”

Pei said he would like to place the building in a park-like setting, giving patients and their families a positive feeling from the moment they pull up.

Once inside, the architect’s challenge is to create intimate spaces within a huge structure, breaking the building into smaller components, “not door after door on a long corridor,” he said.

As important, Pei said, is the master plan for the entire medical complex, which should look as if it has been woven into the rest of the campus with a complementary design and structure:

“The campus is very beautiful, as you know, and we should do no less,” said Pei, who in 1979 won the American Institute of Architects’ highest honor, the gold medal for most distinguished service to the architectural profession.

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The current 1940s-era medical center, housing the hospital and the schools of medicine, dentistry, nursing and public health, lost about 14% of its structural integrity when its walls cracked during the 1994 Northridge quake.

Although still functioning and not believed to pose safety problems now, the facility would be at great risk during another temblor, officials said. UCLA maintained that it would cost more to upgrade the existing Westwood hospital to current seismic codes than to build a new one.

So in addition to their other challenges, the architects are charged with designing a facility that would be operational immediately after a major quake.

“The old facility is an enormous facility,” said Erich Burkhart, one of the new hospital project’s executive architects. “We surveyed 9,000 rooms within the existing facility. We had to go through each room and document all the damage.”

Pei, who designed the new entrance to the Louvre in Paris, the New York Convention and Exhibition Center in Manhattan, as well as CAA’s Wilshire Boulevard offices, will serve as a consultant to his sons.

Chien Chung Pei and Li Chung Pei of the Pei Partnership, which designed the Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York City, will be the hospital’s design architects--in charge of conceiving the building’s exterior, public spaces, courtyards, lobbies and the like.

The executive architect for the hospital, charged with creating the facility’s medical spaces and producing the working drawings and construction specifications, is the Los Angeles firm Lee, Burkhart, Liu, which specializes in designing medical facilities.

Two other architecture firms, Cesar Pelli & Associates of Connecticut and Perkins & Will of Chicago and Santa Monica will handle the plans for two ancillary lab buildings. Pelli is best-known locally as the architect of the Pacific Design Center.

UCLA officials described two major phases of the project.

The first, slated to begin next year, calls for the demolition of Parking Structure 14, at the southern end of the campus, the site of the new medical center.

This phase also includes construction of the first part of the new Center for Health Science, including most patient care areas and two adjacent research labs.

The second part of construction includes razing the most seriously damaged parts of the existing hospital complex and the construction of a new biomedical library and the rest of the educational, research, administration and hospital facilities.

The new medical center will take into account the changes that have taken place in medicine over the last 40 years, Jensen said. For example, preliminary plans call for 160 fewer beds in the new hospital than the old but more space per bed and all private rooms. Research facilities will be expanded by 25%, university officials said.

UCLA planners are also promising the most technologically advanced hospital ever built.

In the new facility, patients no longer will go from window to window trying to register and give basic information. Instead, the hospital will employ an elaborate system of computer monitors equipped with touch screens and video conferencing capabilities that will allow a patient to communicate with various parts of the hospital at one sitting.

That same technology--combined with a state-of-the-art fiber-optic cable system throughout the complex--will also allow doctors to communicate better and faster with one another, said Robert Konishi, the medical center’s director of computer information services.

Instead of being limited to voice communication over a telephone, doctors will be able to transmit images, sounds and text across the hospital or around the world--enabling them to examine a patient in a remote location using a video screen and receive his or her X-rays at the same time, Konishi said.

“We will be able to bring the expertise of the UCLA Medical Center to more than just those in the physical building,” Konishi said.

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Even the hospital’s location reflects a new approach to medicine.

With a new site immediately to the north of the current UCLA Medical Plaza, an outpatient facility, coordination and shared functions will be that much easier--reflecting American medicine’s growing reliance on outpatient care. The two buildings will even be connected on several floors, Jensen said.

Patients coming in for elective surgery, handled in the medical plaza, will have the assurance of being right next to an emergency room.

“Now, if there is a complication, an ambulance would have to be called to drive the patient around to the hospital, which is a block away,” Jensen said.

The UCLA Medical Center, judged the best in the West by U.S. News and World Report for seven consecutive years, has more than 1,600 full-time faculty members in 18 departments at its School of Medicine. An additional 6,000 doctors from the community hold clinical faculty appointments. About 800 interns and residents are in postgraduate training programs at the school.