The Lenox Hill HealthPlex in the West Village neighborhood of New York City recently opened in the ground floor of the 1964 headquarters of the National Maritime Union, according to an article on the Contract magazine website.
Fitting a technology-intense facility within this "architectural one-off" is not as odd an adaptive reuse as one might expect, the article said.
The building’s original architect was Albert Ledner — a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple who used some of Wright's themes — who designed a double-height hall with a glass-block enclosure of paired, interlocking circles.
Today, patients enter a glass vestibule and pass into a small lobby where triage staff determines the urgency of each case. To either side, the rounded replacement glass-block walls soften the geometry of the waiting rooms.
The HealthPlex has swiveling wall-mounted armatures that hold devices for doctors to take medical histories, record findings, print lab-specimen labels and video consult with specialists — all while facing the patient, according to the article.
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