CONTEMPORARY NY
New York Architecture Images-  Williamsburg Brooklyn

Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center

architect

Kallman & McKiniell /Russo & Sonder, associated architects.

location

760 Broadway at Flushing Avenue Brooklyn

date

1977

style

Brutalism  

type

Utility

images

A space odyssey that landed at this juncture of Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Bushwick, this machine for health was the most technologically and architecturally up-to-date, and the most expensive, hospital of its time. The self-weathering steel has acquired a deep purple-brown patina on this bold, cubistic place. Great human-high trusses span 69 feet, within which workers can adjust the complex piping and tubing that serve the rooms and laboratories above and below these interleaved service levels. Kallman & McKiniell's first and major monument was the competition-winning Boston City Hall. With this machine for medicine they have created a superbuilding, a somewhat scary ode to health, dedicated more to the efficiency of health economics than to the serenity of its clients. Widely reviewed in architectural literature, it has won many prizes.

contact

nyc-architecture.com

  with thanks to "The AIA Guide to New York",