"They also take Mr. Pei back to the historic roots of his style. The Guggenheim Pavilion, the first hospital designed by one of our leading modernists, recalls to mind that modern architecture was initially something of a public health crusade. Bright, open buildings, it was believed, would nurture healthy, active bodies. Glass curtain walls would rid buildings of germs and banish depressing gloom. Rationally planned cities would combat contagious diseases. When critics complained that modern buildings looked like hospitals, in other words, they weren't far off the mark....The Guggenheim Pavilion, designed in association with Ellerbe Associates, is a building of uncommon clarity in more than one sense: lucid in organization, lustrous in space.

"These qualities derive from the recognition, shared by Mr. Pei and Mount Sinai's administration, that hospitals serve two groups of people with very different needs. For hospital staff, they are work places that require a vast inventory of technical equipment and equally vast spaces to house it. Patients and visitors, on the other hand, crave relief from the stress of illness and unfamiliar surroundings.

"Usually, the psychological needs of patients are given short shrift. Public spaces are limited to corridors clogged with trolleys, wheelchairs and oxygen tanks; headache-inducing elevator lobbies, and cafeterias where the design competes with the menu for inhospitality. Wisely, Mount Sinai recognizes that it takes more than first-rate staff and advanced technology to serve patients well. They've invested in a design that enhances their hospital's public dimension.

"The key to the building's clarity is a circulation system that knows when to bring patients and staff together, when to serve them separately. A slim rectangular block, housing doctors' offices, runs the full length of the 100th Street site from Fifth to Madison. It provides a circulation spine for hospital staff and for patients returning to their rooms from intensive care. Corridors for visitors and recovering patients line the south walls of the atriums. Instead of running an obstacle course around doctors, nurses, IV stands and dinner trays, visitors walk through light, space and landscaping. Patients are housed in three 11-story towers set at angles to the long block and joined to it at their corners. The atriums occupy leftover space between the towers. This configuration allows for superb views from each of the hospital's 650 beds. Rooms along the Fifth Avenue side command magnificent vistas of Central Park. Now that's intensive care.

"Circulation also helps the building work as urban design. From the Fifth Avenue entrance, a sequence of light-filled public spaces unfolds, leading through the south atrium to a glass-enclosed plaza beyond. This enclosure, which lifts pedestrian circulation from underground corridors into the light of day, links the pavilion to the Annenberg Building, an austere rusted steel high-rise built in 1967. Besides knitting together Mount Sinai's disjointed campus, the plaza brings the outdoors into the pavilion, an inversion that marks this as a modern building in the tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. And the interplay between interior and exterior space creates an apt metaphor for the hospital as a place where people withdraw and prepare to rejoin the life of the city.

"Mr. Pei's use of materials elaborates on the interplay between interior and exterior space. Within and without, walls are made of the identical brick, a buff color tinted in shades of yellow, violet and gray. With the texture and tone of pale suede, the brick catches the light and gently suffuses it through the windows of patient rooms that face into the atriums.

"The building's exterior is as contextual as a large modern building can be in a neighborhood of prewar residential buildings. Its brick and limestone walls echo the facades of apartment buildings along upper Fifth Avenue. Floor slabs, expressed on the building skin, are visually joined to the windows with limestone trim, an appealing if most unmodern hint of the classic Georgian terrace. Notches formed where the towers join reduce the building's bulk."