As a physician, Richard Ehrlich admires the new UCLA hospital as a technological wonder. As a photographer, he marvels at its startling beauty.

At least once a week for the past two years, Richard Ehrlich has put on a hardhat, grabbed his cameras and headed into the pit from which UCLA's new hospital is rising. For the next five or six hours, he wanders the site, his artist's eye on the lookout for images of beauty amid the sweat and grit of construction.

Among the thousands of images Ehrlich has captured are pictures of surprising delicacy. The jutting of rebar and steel play off of each other, creating patterns of broken light and interlacing shadow. Brawny workers strapped into safety harnesses are cantilevered from vertical faces. Iron beams with patinas of umber rust bear coded instructions scrawled in chalk that describe exactly where and how to place uprights and cross members.

"The construction workers would ask why I wanted to take pictures of ugly steel," Ehrlich says. "But the steel is amazing and beautiful. It is like looking at abstract painting."

The pictures indeed are lovely and powerful at the same time, but since he embarked on this project, Ehrlich has looked upon the construction of the new I. M. Pei-designed hospital with more than just a photographer's sensibility. As a physician - the windows of his sixth-floor office in 100 Medical Plaza overlook the site to the north - Ehrlich sees, too, the majesty of what will transpire within the walls once the building is completed by the end of 2005. The new hospital will replace UCLA's old medical center, which was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and will be one of the first structures in the state to meet stringent 2008 California earthquake-safety standards for hospital construction.

What he has watched emerging on the southwest corner of Westwood Plaza and Young Drive South is a hospital for the 21st century that marries cutting-edge medical technology with state-of-the-art patient care. Not only will the new facility provide the newest and best equipment, it also will incorporate an aesthetic awareness that seeks to make the hospital experience, as difficult as it is, one that is more humane for patients and their families. The interior of the eight-story structure will be flooded with natural light from windows that overlook gardens, green spaces and gathering places. All of the 525 rooms will be spacious and private, and will include hook-ups so that most diagnostic procedures can be done at the bedside. Within each room is an area for family members who wish to stay overnight. Individual elevators are designated for patients, and a special elevator equipped with diagnostic equipment will carry trauma patients directly from the two helicopter pads to the emergency room.

The construction of the new UCLA hospital, which will combine UCLA Medical Center, the Neuropsychiatric Hospital and Mattel Children's Hospital, coupled with the renovation of Santa Monica-UCLA Hospital ranks as one of Southern California's largest building projects. Together, the two facilities will provide the most comprehensive medical services in the western United States. On its own, the new 1.1-million-square-foot hospital is immense, incorporating 7 million pounds of steel rebar, 44,700 cubic yards of concrete, 23,000 tons of steel, 80,000 square feet of window glass and 264,000 square feet of travertine wall panels.

"It has been like watching the emergence of a vision for the future," says Ehrlich. "I see everything that is wonderful in the hospital we now have being duplicated and improved upon in this new building. There will be marvelous new medical technologies, and at the same time it is artistically beautiful. I feel that I have been very privileged to be able to photograph it. It is going to be spectacular."