Liberty Building, Public hospital in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Liberty Building is a concrete structure erected in the 1970s near central Montevideo that now serves as the headquarters of the State Health Services Administration. It houses orthopedic care facilities and administrative departments for medical programs.
Planned under the de facto government installed after the 1973 coup and finished in the late 1970s, the building was designed for the Ministry of Defense. In 1985 Julio María Sanguinetti moved the presidential office here from the Palacio Estévez; Sanguinetti, Lacalle, Batlle and Vázquez worked in it. In 2006 Tabaré Vázquez announced the move to the Torre Ejecutiva, completed in 2009, after which the Ministry of Public Health assigned the building to the State Health Services Administration.
The Parque de las Esculturas next to the building opened in 1996 with a permanent display of modern sculptures, so the grounds are the one part of the site the public can walk through. The building itself is a working hospital and health administration office, not a museum.
The building is not open to tourists; it is a working hospital and administrative headquarters, so entry is limited to patients, staff and official business. It stands in the Simón Bolívar neighbourhood, beside the Parque de las Esculturas created in 1996, whose outdoor sculptures can be seen without entering. The Instituto Nacional de Ortopedia y Traumatología occupies part of the complex.
In March 2021 the building became one of two reference centres for COVID-19 patients in Montevideo, alongside the Hospital Español; the orthopaedics institute reorganised its wards for moderate and severe cases.
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