THE PROJECT ARCHITECT

Paul Morgan
To design a project that will give an established hospital a 100,000- square-foot wing for critical-care departments and related services, another 100,000-square-foot addition of 120 acute-care patient rooms, a tri-level 360-space parking structure, and 90,000 square feet of modernized space, international architectural fi rm Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, Inc. (HOK), assembled a team of healthcare design specialists from its Los Angeles and San Francisco offices.

HOK project architect Paul Morgan, together with design principal Ernest Cirangle and principal-in-charge Bill Roger, led the process of creating the concept drawings for Community Hospital’s new garage and the architecture for the new South Pavilion, Forest Pavilion, and existing structure renovations.

“It was the desire of the hospital,” says Morgan, “to have the new architecture match the existing building so there’s no division between what’s old and what’s new. We used that as our guide, down to original architect Edward Durrell Stone’s trademark symbol of concentric squares in the façade of the building. With our design, we were trying to provide the hospital with a state-of-the-art facility that would include new medical programs to better serve the community. That’s the whole goal.”

Morgan’s earliest career intentions were in the medical fi eld. Raised by an engineer and a teacher, he also developed an interest in past civilizations and the ancient history of man, including the environment in which he lived and the structures he built.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology at UCLA and then went on to earn a master’s from the architecture school at the University of Colorado. 

“Having grown up in Los Angeles,” he said, “I wanted to try living somewhere else for awhile. I’m a big skier, so Colorado seemed like a good  match. I managed to fit in a few runs between classes.”

Following graduation, Morgan went to work for John Ferguson & Associates, a small architectural firm in Los Angeles that specialized in the healthcare field. Nearly four years ago, he made the move to the Los Angeles office of HOK, one of the largest architectural and engineering firms in the world.

“My career has been focused on healthcare,” he says. “Hospital architecture presents a dynamic range of challenges. One person cannot do it all, so the design of the project is done by a whole team of architects, designers, medical planners, and engineers who produce the drawings and deal with the details that make it all fi t together.”