Design Review

St. Luke’s unveiled its huge—83,000 square-foot hospital last week. The two-story building is nearly three times as large as the lodge at River Run. Pardon us if we do not ooh and ahh, despite the $27 million price tag. For that, it should look better.

The massive structure looks like it came straight out of suburbia. The building sits in the middle of a sea of asphalt. It looks like it ought to be part of the mall in Boise, a city that is modeling its own design after Los Angeles, the western Mecca of ugly.

The hospital’s proposed landscaping is the standard stingy suburban nod to greenery—mostly straight rows of plants surrounded by a parking-striped prison of cement and blacktop.

The building looks like the architects struggled—and failed--to escape their institutional straight jackets. A couple of pitched roof lines hanging like afterthoughts from some seriously empty walls are a poor disguise.

Granted, the designers did better than the kings of cinder-block architecture who inflicted box stores on perfectly good towns everywhere. However, we’ve been spoiled by Sun Valley Company owner Earl Holding whose new ski lodges honor their alpine environs and offer a warm invitation to everyone who sees them.

The computer generated aerial image of the hospital shows a design that overwhelms everything around it. Two stories are a good use of space, but the design offers no warm welcome to people most in need of one—the frightened and ill.

Ketchum—in whose zone of impact the hospital lies—will not be allowed to review the design of one of the largest buildings in the county. That‘s a shame. Blaine County, which has only the sketchiest design-review control over the hospital, will have the final word.

In their desperation to unload the contentious politics of the public hospitals, Ketchum, Sun Valley and county officials should not allow the hospital to escape the rigorous scrutiny that commercial buildings less than one-tenth the size of the hospital receive.

If the hospital is built as proposed, the valley can kiss its precious mountain atmosphere goodbye. The north valley will look like Everywhere, USA.

The pity is that this valley is not in the business of looking like Everywhere, USA. Averell Harriman knew it. So does Earl Holding. Why doesn’t St. Luke’s?