Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center Releases Plans for Its
$205 Million Complex on 16th
Mirror staff
Hard on the heels of the commencement of Saint John’s Hospital’s
enormous redevelopment project, Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center has announced plans to
rebuild and enlarge its hospital on Sixteenth Street in Santa Monica.
Like the St. John’s project, UCLA’s was set in motion by damage
suffered in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
The Medical Center’s Tower building has been retrofitted, but University
of California Board of Regents voted in March to build
a new center, which, in renderings by architect Robert A.M. Stern and Anshen and Allen
Architects, looks more like a college campus than a hospital.
The new 320,000 square foot complex, which covers a city block, bounded by
Sixteenth, Wilshire Boulevard, Seventeenth Street and Arizona, will cost $205 million,
will and will be completed by 2003.
With 266 beds, it can handle four times as many patients as the existing
hospital.
The new medical center will be constructed in stages, beginning next year
with a 600-car parking structure and a community park on Sixteenth Street. In 2001, the
new hospital and rehab of the Merle Norman Pavilion will be undertaken. On their
completion, the Tower Building will be razed.
On the drawing board are a new orthopedic wing, emergency and diagnostic
rooms, an auditorium, library and museum.
Some $72 million of the $205 million will come from the Federal Emergency
Management Agency.
Robert A.M. Stern, one of the complex’s architects, was recently named
Dean of the Yale School of Architecture. He is known for contemporary renditions of
classical architectural styles. The other architects, Anshen and Allen, are based in San
Francisco and have won acclaim for modernist structures.
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