At The Hospital

Published in Issue 10 of The New York Review of Architecture (2020)

On March 10 I went to Lebanese artist Rayyane Tabet’s talk at the Cooper Union. He welcomed everyone by jesting he was delivering the last lecture in New York, which might as well have been true. Later that evening, I visited my roommate for the first time at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn in Sunset Park. He had been hospitalized when I was traveling, so I was surprised to encounter an unconventional hospital building, eerily calm during the onset of New York’s coronavirus outbreak.

Located just north of Cass Gilbert’s Brooklyn Army Terminal, the building was commissioned by the American Machine and Foundry Company as a lumber warehouse in the 1920s. Repurposed as a foundry and machine shop in 1941, it produced goods for World War II and the Atomic Energy Commission until 1968, when the site was gifted to the city, eventually being converted into a hospital in the late 1970s.

Occupying most of the site, the 444-bed, 500,000-square-foot hospital runs 700 feet along the southern edge of an entire block. A late modernist addition of glass and con- crete was glued onto the original J-shaped, five-story Art Deco warehouse. The flexibility of the industrial space easily accommodated the large floor-to-floor heights, reinforced structure, and upgraded MEP systems typically required by a medical facility.

The particular spatial requirements of infirmaries were historically fueled by the idea that architecture—by providing access to light, air, and distance through formal relations—could shape public health. The Enlightenment instrumentalized hospitals as tools of reform, the body becoming a site for the technology of space to act upon. Beyond the scale of the building, bodily systems have become common metaphors in urban design since the 19th century.

While our understanding of epidemiology has greatly changed contemporary healthcare design, these foundational notions of spatial relations are once again operative in the world under the coronavirus pandemic, exemplified by lines drawn onto store floors—tools imparting metrics of safe social distancing. Masks, gloves, and scorned looks at coughers now seem commonplace.

When I first entered NYU–Brooklyn, a nurse at a small plastic folding table greeted me with a verbal screening for Covid-19 symptoms. Not unlike the transformation of the Javits Center into a field hospital, this measure is a microcosm of the temporary architectural response to this moment of viral crisis.

Nevertheless, a February 26 article in the Wall Street Journal revealed NYU Langone’s plans to expand the Brooklyn campus with a $650 million patient tower. Visions of permanent reform over temporary change are what we must draw upon when thinking through the future of public health. Let us use the solidarity that has arisen around our newfound collective awareness of health to create real reform, to permeate that energy into other spheres of life. Architecture only matters if there are people for it to affect, so for the love of your fellow humans, wash your hands, cover your mouth, and stay inside.