RSS
Home
2501 Ocean Avenue: Architecture and modern medicine in the age of Flash Gordon
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
2501 Ocean Avenue
You're tooling around San Francisco in your Oldsmobile, one of your kids has the chicken pox, she's pointing her ray gun at you, and you're looking for a doctor but can't get your mind off the cool aid that she's managed to splatter all over the vinyl upholstery. It's 1941. Where do you go? Well, if you lived in the Outer Sunset, then the obvious choice was the Lakeside Medical Center at Ocean Avenue and Junipero Serra Boulevard.
The Lakeside Medical Center occupies the tip of triangular parcel of land where Eucalyptus Drive intersects Ocean Avenue. It was designed by Harold G. Stoner in 1941 for the Stoneson Brothers, a real estate development group who, together with Stoner, set the tone for much of what Lakeside Park is known for today -- single-family homes rendered in a restrained Mediterranean style.
Stoner's idea for the Medical Center however is a radical departure from the "California colonials" he created for Lakeside Park. He instead executed it in the Streamline Moderne style -- an Art Deco offshoot that gained currency in the 1940s and 50s. The style underscored the use of clean lines, abstract shapes, and smoothed surfaces in new construction. In fact, Stoner's two-story building has little surface ornamentation that would detract from the bold geometries of the architect's design. To this end, Stoner nicely plays off the triangular shape of his flat-iron building against a massive, overhanging eave with rounded edges, one that traces a wide arc along the building's perimeter. The front of the building echoes and amplifies this arc; its rounded shape contrasts the straight-edge proportions of the upper story. The second story similarly pits curves against straight lines; the pitched roof of the second story is perfectly bisected by a square tower that itself is punctuated in the middle by a round spire. Stoner nevertheless unifies this interplay of shapes at all levels by repeating a Streamline Moderne motif of three parallel lines -- notably along the tower and spire, under the eave, and along the facade on Ocean Avenue.
Contrasting geometries aside, the Lakeside Medical Center is also noteworthy for its lack of references to the architecture of the previous centuries, or even to Stoner's interpretations of them in his other work. The Medical Center is perhaps atypical of Stoner's work, but to characterize it as a whim or experiment is to deny the visual impact it had on a community that had a very different, but cohesive, look -- one that Stoner himself had a hand in crafting. Stoner in fact designed 75% of the residences in Lakeside Park. The other possibility therefore exists that Stoner intended the Medical Center to stand so distinctly apart from the revivalist styles of the community he built. The building is clearly forward looking, modern if you will, even futuristic. Stoner used the language of Streamline Modernism to create something new and impart a sense of progress in the neighborhood, one that is based more on mathematics and science than history or the classics.
But why modernism and medical centers? Is there some deeper connection between design and hospitals that goes beyond the impulse to dress up a very specialized building type in the conventions of the day, or in Stoner's case, in something new and different? Architectural historians have in fact charted the use of design to repackage the idea of the hospital from an institution of disease to one of healing. For example, turn-of-the century hospitals sometimes drew references from domestic architecture to more closely associate the feeling of a nurturing environment that is typical of one's home to the purported equally nurturing (though obviously more intimidating) setting of a hospital, essentially softening the blow of science and technology on the human body. And the association literally paid off, for the more closely a hospital resembled a familiar space, the more willingly a patient was to be an active consumer of hospital services.
So, what then are the implications of Stoner's hospital design that, from the 20th century consumer's perspective, squarely associates patient care with Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers? A spaceship -- that's what the Lakeside Medical Center must have looked like to you and your ray-gun wielding daughter, right? Stoner had at his disposal several local examples of beaux-arts or neo-classical styles to which he could have turned for inspiration. Take for example San Francisco General Hospital. Originally built in the 1870s but remodeled in 1915 by Newton J. Tharp, the hospital was made to resemble a cluster of very opulent-looking Renaissance pavilions. The exteriors were rendered in brick and replete with arches, fountains, and terra cotta trim – all of which was set among meandering paths in a park-like setting. Tharp’s design was so popular that, in the following year, the hospital successfully increased the number of elective surgeries by 400 percent.
Stoner eschewed these examples and the message he intended for 2501 Ocean Avenue could not have been more different. The Lakeside Medical Center literally and figuratively made a point of being unfamiliar, perhaps even unsettling, thereby offering the alternative view of modern medicine as unfettered by preconceived notions of domestic ideals, tradition, or even craft, and without such boundaries, thus able to pave the way to new and unexpected possibilities. Stoner proffered that his streamline building (and by extension, the practitioners within its walls) was instead grounded in science and technology. History and the classics had their place, but they were perhaps limited in scope. In the 1940s -- the "Machine Age" that saw unparalleled developments in railroad, automobile, and aircraft technology -- such intellectual pursuits were even irrelevant for they held you back, not propel you forward.
If Stoner's work was a whim or experiment, it was not without resonances elsewhere in the state. The connection between Streamline Moderne design and the 20th-century hospital is made explicit by a very tight group of medical buildings in Southern California. That same celebration of modernity and science is expressed in the asymmetrical bold geometries of the Santa Monica Medical Center (1941), the Santa Monica Doctor's Building (1946-52), and the addition to St. John's Hospital (1949). Stoner's Medical Center is therefore important because it represents this nascent trend within medical architecture, and yet predates the SoCal buildings by several years. But unlike the Santa Monica Doctor's Building which was submitted for landmark status in March 2009, the Lakeside Medical Center is not a designated landmark.
Thankfully, the exterior is largely the same as Stoner first conceived it in 1941. The reference to math is still explicit in Stoner’s overall geometric design, as is the nod to science in the decorative spire, one that in the 1940s must have connoted a radio beacon, but in today’s Digital Age, more closely resembles a WiFi tower. And this very cool building continues to serve its community well into the 21st century as a place of healing, as well as advance the notion of a bright and wide-open future.
Sources/links:
Harold G. Stoner
www.mtdavidson.org
"Western" San Francisco
www.outsidelands.org
San Francisco and Streamline Modernism
www.ianberke.com
History of Medical Architecture
Adams, Annmarie. Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943.
(University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
History of San Francisco Hospitals
http://history.library.ucsf.edu/
Streamline Modern Medical Buildings of Santa Monica, CA
Landmarks Commission of the City of Santa Monica
Special thanks to the folks at the San Francisco History Center for getting me off to a great start.
Related Articles:
Comments
