Two Large White Buildings

Every Thursday morning I leave my brown house in the green forest and drive 10 miles up the Pacific coast beside the blue ocean to the town of Monterey.

Monterey Bay AquariumMy destination is a large white building, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a three-story former sardine cannery now a world-class conservation center and tourist destination. 

On the way I drive past another large white building, the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, a large sprawling complex, pure white outside and in.

I love both of these buildings, their style, their beauty, their history, their purpose.  Both are very important to our community, and have been a central part of my life here, indeed life saving to me.

So I’m going to spend the next couple columns thinking about this Hospital and this Aquarium, these two large public white buildings.

What do they have in common?  Think about a hospital and/or aquarium you know and see if this list works, or what you can add to it.

   - Big buildings with lots of different kinds of living things inside.

   - Concerns and rules about health and cleanliness.  

   - Complicated plumbing systems. 

   - Often multistoried and white.

   - Many windows.

   - People coming and going.  Some have jobs there and try to keep things alive.  Others pay to get in and
     hope for a good experience and value for their dollar.  Some are volunteers who help others find their way.

   - Open rooms for gathering, waiting, viewing and visiting.

   - Behind the scenes rooms like mysterious labs and quarantine rooms and storage areas.  Big machines in the
      basement or on the roof.  Use of the term “operation.”

   - Inspired by science and technology; at the same time they try for some personal touches and aesthetics. 

   - At all hours there is at least a minimal hum of activity and monitoring; you can’t just turn off the lights and
     go home at night or on holidays.

   - Places of birth and death and everything in between.

   - Gift shops. 

   - Cafeterias.

   - Complicated kitchens.

   - Good clean, accessible bathrooms.

Some history:

Community Hospital of the Monterey PeninsulaIt’s universally called CHOMP, Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula.  It began 100 years ago as a small clinic in Carmel, then a larger building in downtown Monterey.  In 1962 doctors and civic minded citizens raised a lot of money for a modern, state of the art, architect-designed building on land in a large pine forest donated by Samuel FB Morse, local generous land baron.  With a large indoor fountain and koi pond, art work in every room and forest views from every window, it has a somewhat ritzy style and reputation (the nutrition staff delivers your meals wearing black jackets and bow ties.)  But it's a highly rated heart and cancer center.  Both my husband and I have had life saving surgery there.

The Aquarium’s history begins with the prosperous sardine industry of the first half of the 20^th century, with canneries up and down the Monterey Bay coastline.  Norwegian immigrant Knut Hovden built the Hovden Cannery in the 1916 and became the Henry Ford of the industry, automating much of fishing and canning of the tiny fish.  His cannery operated into the 1950’s, but even he couldn’t can what was no longer in the bay, and over-fishing caused the industry to crash after the war. The big white building sat empty for decades, a hulking abandoned shell, until young marine biology grad students from the next door’s Stanford University Hopkins Marine Station came up with the crazy idea to buy it and transformed into the Aquarium.  It helped that one of them was the daughter of David and Lucile Packard, of Hewlett Packard fame and fortune.  Designed to keep the look of the old cannery on the outside, inside it has million gallon tanks, a complicated plumbing system taking water from the bay, and state of the art technology and labs. It opened its doors in 1984 and welcomes over a million visitors every year.

Both institutions are non profits.   I like that community folks saw a need, and that wealthy local people were generous.  I also like that they created not just functional spaces, but places of beauty.  Both could have sacrificed beauty for function.  But the founders of both the Hospital and the Aquarium insisted that beauty would further their mission.  Beauty helps healing, and beauty inspires conservation.  

The Hospital has a huge budget for art.   I was recently a patient at Community Hospital; in my room hung a painting of a favorite local beach, China Cove at Point Lobos, where I have visited many times.  My slow healing came thanks to the drugs and nurses and physical therapists.  And thanks to that painting, especially during those long lonely painful nights, staring at the cove.  Someone set up their easel and painted it, someone decided to have art in every room, someone donated it, someone hung it up; my healers.

The Aquarium also uses beauty to promote its mission, which is “To inspire conservation of the ocean.”  They know that changing behavior (being better ocean stewards) requires inspiration as well as information, and that beauty inspires.  A recent exhibit, “Jellies: Living Art” presented jelly fish as works of art, with some of the tanks surrounded by ornate picture frames and protected with a velvet rope in front like at a museum.

I go to the Aquarium much more often than the Hospital.  I’m at the Aquarium at least once a week, and have been a volunteer for 17 years – I just got my 3000 hour pin. There have been times in my life when I worked at a hospital, as a chaplain, so I was there every day, at age 26 and again at age 43.  Now I go to hospitals more rarely, but in the past 10 years I’ve had two major surgeries at CHOMP, and have visited family and friends there often, attended births and deaths.

With both big white buildings I feel confident when I walk through their fancy entrances.  There’s a sense of competence and experience and care for life that pervades both kinds of buildings and all the people and other life forms inside.  I feel like I am in good hands.

My experience as hospital chaplain and visitor (and as patient) is that health care workers seem to be more caring and generous than the general population.  Likewise Aquarium staff.  Maybe there is self-selection for folks going into this kind of work, that they tend to reach out, listen, want things to be better.  Or maybe these work environments bring out the better parts of human nature in a way that working in a factory or changing people’s oil simply doesn’t encourage or reward.  I like to think that working in a big, open, clean, well-lit, life-promoting building fosters open, life-promoting people. 

In both places there’s a lot going on, noise, movement, groups of people gathered to make decisions and try to make things better. 

But both places also offer quiet rooms for these visitors and patients.  Hospitals have chapels or meditation rooms.  And Aquariums have realized that some people come not for the excitement and exotic thrills, but for more meditative reflection and inspiration.  Exit surveys show that 15% of Aquarium visitors are what the marketing people call “spiritual pilgrims.”  So this big white building has set aside a few quiet places, plays meditative new age music in the jellies exhibit, posts inspiration quotations on the walls.  I like seeing fish, and I like seeing quotations from Thoreau; “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

Many doctors have fish tanks in their offices because looking at marine life calms people down; medical studies prove that blood pressure goes down looking at fish.  So maybe the two white buildings could combine – fish in the operating rooms, operating tables in front of the exhibits.

For now we just say thanks, to these two big white buildings full of life and care and beauty.

Copyright © 2105 Deborah Streeter