ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on hospital architecture and buildings for healthcare, emphasizing the changing natures of the professions associated with medicine in the interwar years. The Art Deco hospital lobby was thus an enticement to visit the institution, a showcase of design, and a history classroom at once. It complemented a narrative about the institution’s affiliations introduced on the decidedly-not-Art-Deco building’s facade. Art Deco design served a unifying function in hospital architecture. Bard Hall, the medical student dormitory built in 1930 by James Gamble Rogers at Columbia Presbyterian, was even more exuberant in its Art Deco styling than the main hospital and medical school it serves. Art Deco was the style of choice for several influential medical schools in addition to those combined with hospitals in New York. Art Deco was often featured in buildings that symbolized medicine, as opposed to those dedicated to patient care.
