Cedars-Sinai Beautification Project Honored for Enhancing a Civic Asset
Los Angeles - June 20, 2012 – Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has won a civic award for a major beautification project featuring lush gardens, landscaped walkways and freshly painted buildings – a renewal meant to turn the campus into an urban oasis.
The medical center has received a Community Impact Award from the Los Angeles Business Council for its “transformational development project,” which, when completed in 2014, will include water fountains, sculptures and roadways framed by palm trees and other greenery.
The council announced the award today as part of its 42nd annual Los Angeles Architectural Awards.
Cedars-Sinai is undertaking the makeover to tie together a campus that accommodates 18,000 to 20,000 patients, medical staff and visitors on a typical day.
“Cedars-Sinai is an important part of this community, and we want to create a soothing environment not only for our patients but for our neighbors,” said Larry Colvin, vice president of facilities planning, design and construction. “The project will beautify and unify this ever changing campus.”
The beautification plan involves two significant elements: landscaping and painting.
- The medical center will be ringed by greenery, including dozens of palms trees and other leafy plants and trees to soften its border and provide shade for pedestrians. Streets and walkways on the medical center campus also will be greened, and the changes will include a cascading water sculpture called “George and Gracie,” named for Hollywood legends George Burns and Gracie Allen, whose names adorn the streets that run through the heart of the medical center. The plaza level, currently a mostly concrete area where patients and families often stroll, will be transformed into a “healing gardens” with lush species of plants and trees, terraced waterfalls, an amphitheater and more than a dozen new works of art.
- Four structures on the medical center campus will be repainted in a “champagne metallic” color to match the newest building on campus, the Saperstein Critical Care Tower. The four are the Davis Building, the Thalians Building, Parking Structure 8 and the eight-story main hospital complex, which is getting its first new paint job since it opened in 1976. Crews already have begun stripping old coats and applying new ones, along with painting window moldings a dark chocolate color. When the work is finished next year, painters will have applied 5,875 gallons of acrylic paint over 885,250 square feet of exterior walls – a paint job that is expected to last at least 10 years.
The president of the Los Angeles Business Council applauded Cedars-Sinai for the beautification efforts and for taking steps to integrate the campus into the surrounding neighborhood.
"It is gratifying to see a medical institution make a physical and important impact on the community by improving its cityscape not only for hospital visitors but for the entire neighborhood as well," said LABC President Mary Leslie.