Esselen Street Clinic

This is the work of a highly inventive architect who rejected the rational approach, choosing to express emotion in his buildings. In 1941 Wilhelm B Pabst designed a bastion against dread disease using imagery from a castle. There are surgical cuts to be endured, a battery of injections, life hangs by a thread. Curves, squares, rectangles are all involved. There is nothing simple about disease, but medicine triumphs and over-sails the site boundaries with the array of balconies and the great Oriel window. (Blue plaque inscription)