Dr. Richard M. Ehrlich, a physician at UCLA for more than 30 years and a fine-art photographer of national reputation, spent more than four years documenting the construction of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He was attracted to the brutal beauty and sometimes surprising delicacy of the building – how rebar and iron played off each other, creating repeating patterns of broken light and interlacing shadow; the way that steel girders, coated with a patina of rust and bearing coded instructions scrawled in chalk and paint, glowed in harsh afternoon sun. It was, he says, “like watching the emergence of a vision for the future. I saw marvelous new medical technologies, brilliant minds and caring people all fused in this artistically beautiful environment.”
