Quote:
Originally Posted by wally
You can't compare it to the collection of historic and newer buildings in the main complex. That's a completely different animal--it's mess that has resulted from decades of incremental expansion.
Pretty sure that PCAM was designed to be expanded quickly and fairly orderly, but they probably wanted to hedge their bet, should things like the economy go south. It was never supposed to be a one-off $1+ billion masterpiece. The first project was the base, on which future towers (e.g., Smillow and the South Pavilion) were to be built. There's not a lot of room around health complex for horizontal expansion, so instead they went with vertical expansion.
Of course, this isn't to say that the resulting Frankenstein's monster of buildings and pavilions is the best that they could have done or should win any great design awards, but there's more going on there than meets the eye.
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Its a fact that the design of Perelman is terrible. They may of had a "plan" but they failed miserably. Let's start with the fact that they schedule to many appointments for the garage and valet to handle. They have no place to put ambulance and paratransit vehicles so they throw them in with the 700+ valet vehicles. They have a cross walk in the middle of the valet driveway, Quite frankly its a miracle no one has been hit. Then when you enter the building, good luck waiting for an elevator. In fact they moved the valet cashier in hopes of having more people use the escalators that malfunction daily. I'm going to stop my rant....
The building itself may be called Perelman aka PCAM but its not all Penn Medicine. Smilow is part of Penn the university as well as JMEC. Its all confusing.