The Look of Penn's New Med Center

Since it was impossible to tell anything about the new Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine from the Inquirer photo that ran with my Friday column, here are a couple of my own humble pics.
Basically, I have two beefs with this building, designed jointly by Rafael Vinoly Architects and Perkins Eastman: its aesthetics and its lack of urbanity. The $302 million design weirdly surrounds a gigantic, 110-high cube-shaped glass atrium with the most banal of ribbon-windowed suburban office buildings. I describe the look variously as an "architectural car crash" and a "python strangling its fragile prey."

It's bad enough when a building of this prominence (it replaces the much loved, art deco Civic Center) looks bad, but it's even worse when it thumbs its nose at the general public. My column takes issue with the massive driveway and porte cochere that dominates the entrance, which perpetuates the unfriendly street environment of Penn's hospital district.
A couple of emailers wrote to take me to task for begrudging the seriously ill an easy drop-off at the front door. Just to be clear, I never suggest there shouldn't be a drop off. What I argue for is a drop-off that also respects the thousands of people who work at the hospital complex (as well as the occasional pedestrian that might dare to enter through the front door.) Since CAM had a huge, cleared site to work with, it could have located that drop-off in any number of places. I suggested making it part of the large, underground garage, since it's just as easy to access the medical offices from there as from the front lobby. But the drop off mighthave been on the side of the building, which is a less traveled pedestrian street.

So why didn't they do that? If you examine the siting of the building, you'll notice it doesn't respond to the curve in Civic Center Boulevard. Rather, the structure is angled to be seen from 34th and Spruce. Pushing the front door back, behind the driveway, helps position CAM so it can be admired from the corner. if you look at the picture on the right, taken from the South Street Bridge, you'll note that the designers also made a point of showing a good face to Center City. I can only deduce that branding is more important to Penn's medical center than the well-being and comfort of its workforce.