Winter 2003
THE RISING
page
1 | 2
Photography
by Richard Ehrlich
Article by
David Greenwald
At
least once a week for the past two years, Richard Ehrlich has put
on a hardhat, grabbed his cameras and headed into the pit from which
UCLA’s new hospital is rising. For the next five or six hours,
he wanders the site, his artist’s eye on the lookout for images
of beauty amid the sweat and grit of construction.
Among
the thousands of images Ehrlich has captured are pictures of surprising
delicacy. The jutting of rebar and steel play off of each other,
creating patterns of broken light and interlacing shadow. Brawny
workers strapped into safety harnesses are cantilevered from vertical
faces. Iron beams with patinas of umber rust bear coded instructions
scrawled in chalk that describe exactly where and how to place uprights
and cross members.
“The
construction workers would ask why I wanted to take pictures of
ugly steel,” Ehrlich says. “But the steel is amazing
and beautiful. It is like looking at abstract painting.”
The
pictures indeed are lovely and powerful at the same time, but since
he embarked on this project, Ehrlich has looked upon the construction
of the new I. M. Pei-designed hospital with more than just a photographer’s
sensibility. As a physician — the windows of his sixth-floor
office in 100 Medical Plaza overlook the site to the north —
Ehrlich sees, too, the majesty of what will transpire within the
walls once the building is completed by the end of 2005. The new
hospital will replace UCLA’s old medical center, which was
damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and will be one of the
first structures in the state to meet stringent 2008 California
earthquake-safety standards for hospital construction.
<next>
|
View
a slideshow of Richard Ehrlich's images.