The Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building celebrates this branch of medical practice as worthy of high design. This new 173,000-square-foot home for the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, designed by ZGF Architects with Perkins&Will as exterior architect of record, includes a combination of clinical, education, and research facilities for a wide range of users. It offers spaces to UCSF faculty not only from psychiatry but also neurology, pediatrics, neurosurgery, obstetrics/gynecology, radiology, and anesthesiology. And it provides mental health services to both children and adults. “The purpose of this building was to bring everybody together in a much less institutional building than you traditionally see with UC campuses,” says Dan Kingsley, managing partner at SKS Partners, the building’s owner and developer with Prado Group.

The department’s previous home, the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital and Clinics, is such an institution. Located in San Francisco’s Parnassus Heights neighborhood on a campus of UCSF medical buildings, Langley Porter was designed in the early 1940s (and will soon be replaced by a hospital designed by Herzog & de Meuron). The old L-shaped, boxy building with small punched and ribbon windows has a rather defensive street presence. “The Pritzker Building was supposed to be the antithesis of that,” says Dwight Long, design principal of Perkins&Will, “and a beautiful, friendly, welcoming space for mental health care.”