It appears to be a big week for student center design announcements: after Rice University revealed its pick of Adjaye Associates to replace the Rice Memorial Center in Houston with a three-story structure, now Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University presented renderings for the new Hopkins Student Center, designed by BIG.
Dubbed "The Village," the proposal was chosen as the winner of an international design competition led by a special advisory committee which took into consideration more than 1,200 student, faculty, staff, and alumni responses to the four finalist design proposals.
BIG's competition team also includes Shepley Bulfinch as Architect of Record, Rockwell Group as Interior Architects, and Michael Van Valkenburg Associates as Landscape Architects.
"The approximately 150,000-square-foot building will include spaces for relaxation and socialization, creative and performing arts spaces, student resources and support services, lounges, a digital media center, a performance space with seating for 200 people, and a dynamic dining hall that connects directly onto a new plaza along Charles Street," explains the project description. "The facility will satisfy the long-acknowledged need for a true non-academic gathering spot on the university’s Homewood campus in Baltimore, Maryland."
Johns Hopkins University's President, Ronald J Daniels, praised the design, saying: "This will be a new kind of space for us—one that is not academically focused but entirely social by design, open to all, reserved for none, and boasting the kind of flexible spaces that invite connection and collaboration, this will be a place where athletes and actors, step teams and SGA members can gather side by side."
From the project description: "Located just south of the iconic open space on the Johns Hopkins campus known as 'The Beach' at the intersection of 33rd and Charles Streets, the facility will foster greater connectivity between the campus and the neighboring Charles Village community by creating a prominent, welcoming new entry point at 33rd Street. It will turn an area of the campus into a dynamic hub at the crossroads of student activity. As a natural gateway, the area will connect Charles Village and more than 3,500 Hopkins students who live in the neighborhood, to the heart of the Homewood campus."
"The Village is conceived as a central living room surrounded by a collection of spaces tailored to the needs of the Hopkins community. The building negotiates the sloping grade of the site to allow direct entry from all four levels of the building, while maintaining a friendly human scale and providing several accessible routes across the site. Arriving on Charles Street, students and visitors are greeted by an open building façade with dining areas spilling out onto a sun-splashed plaza."
"The entrance of The Village opens into a cascading interior landscape of dining, performance, lounging, and socializing. The mass timber structure provides a warm and acoustically comfortable environment as light filters in between the photovoltaic roof panels—features that help to meet the university’s larger sustainability goals."
Construction on the new Hopkins Student Center is set to commence in Spring 2022 and last until Fall 2024.
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BIG's range of products now includes the "Canopy" range, available in curved pitches and flat. Comes in various sizes and is suitable for campuses and performing arts venues. Tensile cladding not included, wood colors optional. Remember to check out other classics in the BIG catalogue, such as Twisted Bar, Stacked Box, and Glass Pyramid.
The irregular ceilings allow for interesting natural light and spatial elements, but you get the impression the cascading ceiling is determining the spaces on the inside, not vice versa. If not for the wood structure, it would look like a cheap department store. Seems a lot of operations are wood-washing renderings now, when the architecture isn't that interesting. Compared with Artigas FAUSP in Sao Paulo too see a much greater student space--or OMA's IIT center. Could take the same idea and make much more interesting spaces and relationships.
BIG projects are always less interesting then they think they are. Start
with the graphic aerial shot from a view nobody will experience.
It's interesting that a 19 year old building by Tod Williams - Billie Tsien is being demolished to build this.
https://www.archpaper.com/2019/03/hopkins-may-demolish-mattin-center/amp/
https://www.chronicle.com/article/your-college-hired-top-notch-architects-now-you-want-to-tear-down-their-building/
this link is more thoughtful about the important issue of what institutions should do when there is no flaw in a particular building - it just doesn't do what they want done anymore. the observation that modernism has led to structures so purpose-built that they can't accommodate change resonates with me. i certainly feel conflicted about the best approach, as preserving a nice enough but obsolete building that isn't otherwise extraordinary within history is hard to justify.
this is perhaps the opposite of what LACMA is bumbling through, where Zumthor is replacing very generic buildings with a very rigidly defined series of spaces following a single leadership vision. I expect in 20-30 years lacma will encounter the same problem of deciding they don't need the kind of building they have anymore.
In the 2050s, Liz Diller will be hired to remodel LACMA.
Gotta keep up the capital spending and prestige projects to attract alumni donors ... or they could spend even more on a gym or stadium for the football team.
i'm sure this will integrate with baltimore well.
a sign of the times- a tale of two cities!
So I guess they don't need to heat or cool this space. And there's a new plumbing technology with no stacks. I know it's all just renderings but come on.
Temperature issues and upkeep of the many roofs will be the reasons cited when this building is demolished in 20 years.
nah, they'll just have a new board of overseers by then who have a vision of something completely different.
The design does appear to anticipate that global warming will adjust the Baltimore climate to something more like LA or San Diego.
It strikes me that universities and big corporations are tearing down perfectly fine buildings to build new ones -- here, 270 Park, folkMoMA, etc. This has nothing to do with the architecture per se, but more about the bureaucratic politics, where you get paid more for projects, but nobody gets paid for maintenance. Meanwhile all of the capital is flowing into these projects instead of building housing, high speed rail, and other projects outside of the wealth bubbles that don't need it. It's not really about "socialism" but efficiency and how both government and private bureaucrats don't accomplish it.
this is the sort of unnecessary excess that is sending our planet down the tube.
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