St. Joseph’s Hospital [1974]

Completed the year following the since demolished Prentice Women’s Hospital, Bertrand Goldberg’s Tacoma Washington complex reveals many of his signature free flowing forms, with a draped curtain-like facade arrayed with circular glazed sections all sitting within a tightly gridded envelope. St. Joseph’s was the first to take advantage of concrete shell wall construction with the entire mass elevated from a base building that serves as a structural podium by which a series of regular columns taper into thus ensuring the absorption of seismic shock. With a new-age plan that facilitated the necessary patient-doctor proximities of a then-modern medical system, Goldberg’s building is remembered as a trail-blazer for complexes that followed.