Prentice Women's Hospital Building, Hospital building in Streeterville district, Chicago, US.
Prentice Women's Hospital Building is a hospital structure in Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood that stands out for its distinctive architectural design. The facility contained a nine-story central tower with four extending wings arranged in a cloverleaf pattern, all cantilevered above a five-story base section.
Architect Bertrand Goldberg designed the facility, which opened in December 1975 as a women's maternity center. The hospital operated for 36 years before closing in 2011.
The structure represented a shift in how hospitals were designed to serve patients, with its layout reflecting modern thinking about medical care. People recognized it as an architectural statement about what healthcare spaces could be.
The building is located in a central area of Chicago and can be reached easily by public transportation. Since the hospital is no longer operational, visitors can only observe the striking architecture from the outside.
The structure employed computer-aided design techniques borrowed from aeronautical engineering to calculate and implement its curved forms. This approach was unconventional for hospital construction at the time and established new benchmarks for medical facility design.
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