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Hospital Exterior: Ed Reeve; Interiors: Jasper James London�s new digital arts center, the Hospital (top), has multimedia on every floor, including an audio recording facility, an HDTV control room, and a 2,700-square-foot studio.
If it isn't the largest, most teched-out multimedia studio in the world, it's certainly the most glamorous – an exclusive digital mecca for international rock stars, burgeoning artists, and leading-edge broadcasters. And it's perhaps the only hospital anyone would ever want to check into.
The Hospital, the $100 million dream of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart, transformed a 19th-century brick medical building into a 21st-century creative center. Fiber-optic cables were laid throughout the 60,000-square-foot space, allowing filmmakers and musicians to zap their work anywhere in the four-story wonderland. A state-of-the-art audio recording facility and Europe's first high-definition TV studio – which the BBC is already taking advantage of – are in the basement. The public can visit the newly opened ground-floor gallery.
Though the Hospital sounds absolutely fabulous, it almost didn't happen. For six years, the project was in intensive care, fighting one setback after another and haggling with London planning officials, staffing strife, and cost overruns. It was delayed so long that skeptics wrote it off altogether. Now that it's here, Stewart hopes new talent will mix with his well-tended list of luminary friends, which includes Bono, Damien Hirst, and Martin Scorsese. A swanky private club and what is being hyped as the city's hippest organic restaurant are scheduled to open onsite early next year. Just what the doctor ordered.
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