After the live sex demonstration on the Evanston campus last year I figured Northwestern University had gone about as far as it could go on the scale of stunningly stupid behavior. I was wrong. The university’s newly launched public relations campaign to justify blowing Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital off the face of the earth arguably exceeds even the fuck-saw show.
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The university plans to construct a research center on the Prentice site, and it hasn’t been deterred by letters like the one from William F. Baker, architectural engineer for Trump Tower and the Burj Khalifa, to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, which points out that Prentice’s concrete shell sailing 45 feet above its base “is the only example of its type anywhere in the world,” while its pioneering use of aerospace software in design was a “true game changer” that led the way for 21st-century sky grazers. Ditto a letter from all the partners at powerhouse Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, or another directed to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and signed by more than 60 architects, including the likes of Jeanne Gang and Frank Gehry. That one says Prentice “stands as a testament to the Chicago-led architectural innovation that sets this city apart.”
Northwestern’s only apparent response is a PR effort aimed at convincing us that if we don’t let the university tear Prentice down we’ll be responsible for bringing medical research to a halt, leaving humanity subject to rampant disease and causing the city to lose out on $150 million a year in research funding and thousands of jobs. As if this small piece of Streeterville land were the only place where cures for cancer and ALS (they’ve got a video on that) can be discovered, and as if there weren’t a gaping, two-block-long empty lot begging for development right across the street, a site owned by NU-affiliated Northwestern Memorial Hospital. This fatuous campaign, titled Finding Tomorrow’s Cures, includes a section devoted to news coverage of NU’s plans that manages to ignore the avalanche of negative press the issue has generated.
