[BTinSF]

Friday, September 12, 2008
Oakland to Kaiser plan: Start over
Official dubs design ‘hideous’
San Francisco Business Times - by Chris Rauber and Blanca Torres

Like a couple in a troubled marriage, Kaiser Permanente and Oakland can’t seem to agree on Kaiser’s massive seismic rebuild of its flagship hospital.

After a year of talks, the Oakland Planning Commission has given Kaiser a thumbs-down on its latest design proposal for the estimated $900 million project, sending the health-care giant back to the drawing board.

Michael Colbruno, chairman of the Oakland Planning Commission, said the commission considers the design boring and unattractive. The design, by the NBBJ architecture firm, is offensive, Colbruno said, considering that Kaiser was founded in Oakland and remains headquartered there.

“I compared it to something pre-Berlin Wall coming down in East Germany,” Colbruno said. “The design is, for lack of a better word, hideous.”



The rejection could mean a major delay in Kaiser Permanente’s plans to rebuild its Oakland Medical Center, which could cost $900 million, not including nearby medical office buildings, clinics and other facilities.

The planning commission asked Kaiser to come up with a new plan by its Oct. 15 meeting.

The new 349-bed hospital is part of a complex, 900,000-square-foot, $1 billion-plus expansion and replacement project that also involves constructing two medical office buildings, a 500-space parking structure, a 1,200-space parking garage and other support buildings. Kaiser needs to complete the hospital portion by January 2013 to meet state seismic safety regulations, or at least make a good-faith effort to meet that deadline.

“We’ll go back and take another look,” said Michael Lane, Kaiser’s project manager for the huge rebuild. “That’s what we’re looking at right now.”

Lane acknowledged that planning commissioners took exception to the look of the proposed hospital’s 12-story tower, which includes a three-story podium or base, saying it looked like a “big blank box” without enough surface variation to be appealing.

Other complaints included lack of a “defined top” and the lack of an on-street entrance for the cafeteria and pedestrian-friendly walkways.

Colbruno said the commission’s harsh feedback should not come as surprise to Kaiser, which has discussed its design ideas with the community and the planning commission several times since its review process started a year ago.

“They’ve had the comments; they’ve ignored them,” Colbruno said.

Kaiser was surprised by the commission’s stance, Lane said, and had no inkling the commission would raise such significant issues at this stage in the process.

“We had a recommendation from the staff to approve this design,” he said. “So, as a team, we’re asking ‘What else do we need to do?’”

The commission’s main objective is to avoid saddling Oakland with an eyesore, Colbruno said. This decision is the first time he can remember that the six-member planning commission unanimously opposed the design of a commercial building.

“Some people think that in Oakland, people can get away with cutting corners on design, and this commission is against that. There’s some beautiful new buildings in Oakland,” he said, citing new buildings by developers SKS and Shorenstein and the new cathedral. “People can certainly do the work, and Oakland deserves it.”

On other fronts, Lane said Kaiser’s been making progress on its $80 million, 165,000-square-foot medical office building and parking structure at Broadway and West MacArthur Boulevard, which he said is still on track to be completed by next summer. That five-story structure is being built on the former site of a Honda dealership.

Once the new medical office building is completed, the existing one at MacArthur and Piedmont Avenue will be demolished to make room for the new hospital. Barring further delays, that part of the musical-chairs process is expected to start by the first half of next year, Lane said earlier this year, and be completed by the Jan. 1, 2013, state deadline.

Within a few years after that, construction of a 120,000-square-foot medical office building and 1,200-slot parking garage is expected to begin in the space cleared by demolition of the current 350-bed hospital, which dates from the early 1940s.

Extended planning delays on the hospital could result in additional holdups on other portions of the huge endeavor.

crauber@bizjournals.com / (415) 288-4946 btorres@bizjournals.com / (415) 288-4960

Source: http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/...ml?t=printable

I know Michael Colbruno. He's a nice guy with political connections (he started as a reporter for a gay newspaper, became an aide/press spokesperson to Assemblywoman Carole Migden--when I was a volunteer aide in the same office--and, after moving to the East Bay, eventually got his present job). But he is most decidedly NOT an architect. On the other hand, I guess he knows what he likes as well as anyone.