Boos for the Big House

continued

“As a piece of architecture,” says Strickland, “that’s quite an elegant building, one of the more successful on campus or in town. My only misgiving is that they’ve moved the main entrance to the new building. It’s not uncommon when you have an old building with a new addition for the entrance to move to the new building. But in this case it’s a shame, because the old building was such a jewel box. It was such a pleasure to walk up the steps past the columns and into the main hall. It was like entering a different world.”

Topping out at twelve stories, and with an estimated cost of $525 million, the new Mott Hospital is financially and physically the biggest structure the university has ever built. Yet when we asked the architects for their thoughts, they were initially stymied. Though the skeleton of the new hospital for women and children is already rising next to the Nichols Arboretum, it’s hard to see from outside the Medical Campus.

With the priming of a rendering and a video tour of the hospital, though, the words all but spill forth from four of the six. (John Mouat says he’ll “leave it to my esteemed colleagues to weigh in on that one”; Roy Strickland, finishing a building of his own in New York, didn’t reply to an emailed query.)