By ANN DONAHUE

Staff Reporter

Parking Lot 14 on the southern edge of UCLA’s Westwood campus may draw little notice today, but it will soon take center stage as the site of one of the most significant building complexes ever constructed in Los Angeles.

Demolition work already is underway in preparation for the December groundbreaking of the new UCLA Medical Center, deemed necessary after the 1994 Northridge quake severely damaged the existing complex.

The new center and three adjacent research facilities, all designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei and budgeted to cost $770 million, are the major components of the $1.3 billion overhaul.

It is the most expensive construction project ever undertaken by a public university.

“It’s on a level like the Getty (Center), and it’s actually one of the great master campus planning projects going on in the country,” said Michael White, principal partner at HLW International in Los Angeles, who designed the Fox studio lot master plan and a host of other local projects.

White said the new medical facilities will further elevate UCLA’s already-prestigious image as a research and academic center.

“The environment promotes the quality of the university,” he said. “The UCLA campus already has a wonderful collection of architecture and this will add to that.”

The Dec. 8 groundbreaking will mark the culmination of a five-year planning/design process, and will be followed by another five years of actual construction. Simultaneously, an intensive fund-raising effort headed by entertainment power broker Michael Ovitz and grocery mogul Ron Burkle has been under way for several years.

“We’re going through the most demanding planning process anyone could imagine,” said Dr. Gerald Levey, provost of medical sciences at UCLA. “We must complete it on time, on budget and if possible my goal is to complete it under budget. It is a significant financial challenge to us.”

Campus gateway

Located directly inside the UCLA southern entrance, the project will serve as a gateway to the entire campus. Visitors entering from Westwood Boulevard will encounter the new, eight-story medical center immediately to their left and three new laboratory buildings to their right.

“A major focus that we had when we started the design was to try to do something that would improve the overall UCLA campus,” said Didi Pei, son of I.M. Pei and principal design partner of the UCLA project. “Today, there’s no entrance to UCLA, and there should be a gateway to the campus to announce your arrival. We don’t do buildings without trying to see how they fit into their context. We don’t believe in stand-alone icons.”

One of the early plans called for the medical center to be built near the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Veteran Avenue a proposal that was quickly tossed out when administrators realized that some of the patient rooms would look out onto the nearby Veterans Administration cemetery.

The $1.3 billion tab is being supplied by a variety of sources, both public and private.

The lion’s share of the $600 million cost of the medical center itself $432 million is being covered by earthquake-repair funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Another $44.3 million will come from the state of California. That’s roughly 80 percent of the hospital’s cost being covered by government monies.

The other 20 percent will come from private donations raised through the efforts spearheaded by Ovitz and Burkle. Ovitz, a UCLA alumnus whose father underwent successful quadruple bypass heart surgery at UCLA several years ago, has donated $25 million.

Ovitz also recommended to the University of California regents that famed architect I.M. Pei be commissioned to design the project. (Pei designed the Beverly Hills headquarters of Creative Artists Agency when Ovitz headed up that firm.)

Another $25 million has been donated by Mattel Inc. and earmarked for the pediatric hospital that will be built inside the new medical center.

A campus-wide fund-raising effort, dubbed Campaign UCLA, has raised almost 75 percent of the $1.2 billion goal. About half will go toward paying for various components of the medical facilities overhaul and other UCLA medical-related expenses, with the rest going to fund improvements of other UCLA facilities.

27 miles of hallways

The new on-campus complex will replace the existing health sciences campus, which was built in 1955.

That gigantic structure contains 3.3 million square feet of interior space, making it the second-largest public building in the nation (only the Pentagon is larger). There are 27 miles of hallways more than enough to run a marathon without ever going outside. There are 86 separate entrances and exits.

“The joke around here is that people are still lost that went to the hospital 20 years ago for treatment,” said UCLA health sciences spokesman David Langness. “People get lost, people get disoriented, and the goal of the new hospital is to simplify all of this.”

That quest is being undertaken to better accommodate the 5,000 to 10,000 patients who are treated at the hospital on any given day. But the real stimulus was the Northridge quake more than five years ago.

The quake destabilized the center’s foundation, weakened the walls that hold the separate sections of the building together, and caused severe cracks in the structural steel that support the center.

Four teams of seismic engineers examined the structure and determined that the building would most likely collapse if another high-magnitude quake struck. Instead of rebuilding the hospital, they advised replacing it altogether.

UCLA officials said they intend for the new medical center to last the next 100 years, even if the much-dreaded “Big One” hits. Langness said the hospital has been designed with enough stability to withstand an earthquake that measures 8.4 on the Richter scale.

Based on models of the new center that he has seen, Bill Roger, an architect who specializes in hospital design at SMP:SHG, agrees that the new medical center will be very safe.

“Keep in mind, there is no such thing as an earthquake-proof building,” Roger said. “The current (government) standards are very extreme because hospitals are areas that evacuated people go to and are not supposed to be places where people are evacuated from. The goal of a typical building in an earthquake is to make sure that it doesn’t hurt anyone. For a hospital in an earthquake, it’s designed to remain operational.”

Healing garden

After construction is completed, some parts of the old health sciences campus will be demolished. New buildings for the medical school will then be built in their place. Construction for this $330 million second phase is to be complete by 2010.

As for the architectural approach to the first phase, Pei Partnership’s concept involves creating a “healing garden” environment, with plenty of outdoor light streaming into almost every patient’s room. An atrium will be situated at the middle of the hospital and an outdoor terrace will extend from the fourth floor of the building.

The surrounding area will be richly landscaped, with colorful blooming trees like jacaranda surrounding the hospital. Each corridor will have a window at its terminus, allowing patients and visitors to orient themselves with the outside world.

Each room in the new 525-bed hospital will be private. The rooms are large 1,300 square feet and will have couches that can be converted into beds, so relatives can sleep over with the patient. If an emergency arises, the room can be transformed into an individual intensive care unit, with a central power column that can run life-sustaining equipment.

Pei said his father, who is semi-retired at the age of 82, is acting as a consultant and they meet about once a month so the senior Pei can offer advice and suggestions. Hospital officials said they were attracted to Pei’s proposal because he had experience designing another hospital in a major urban environment Mt. Sinai in New York.

Actual construction will be overseen by the Chicago architectural firm of Perkins & Will.

Floor-by-floor

Each floor will be dedicated to a different specialty. Invasive procedures like angioplasties will be done on the second floor, psychiatric patients will be seen on the fourth, the Mattel Children’s Hospital will be on the fifth floor, and neurosurgery, cardiology and oncology will take up the top three floors.

Each room will be wired with fiber-optic cable, and doctors will be given handheld data managers that they can plug in to access the patient’s medical history and current course of treatment.

What is now a separate children’s hospital and neuropsychiatric center will be consolidated into the new medical center.

When the complex opens, the number of beds available will be reduced by almost 250 a nationwide trend given that the length of patient stays has decreased in lieu of outpatient visits.

“Currently, statewide the occupancy of existing facilities is about 50 percent,” said architect Roger. “I think UCLA is trying to correct the situation by reducing the number of beds.”

So after five years of design and planning, UCLA officials are looking forward to the rest of the construction process with guarded optimism.

“The improvements that will come with the new hospital are many,” Levey said. “It’s unfair to compare the old hospital to a new I.M. Pei-designed facility. But there is a lot of pressure on us because we must do this hospital on time.”