Art College's New Dormitory Turns a Challenging Site to Advantage

MICA The Maryland Institute College of Art will open the Gateway on Sunday. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

Baltimore — Even for an urban institution, the Maryland Institute College of Art has an eclectic collection of facilities. In addition to its main building—a 1906 Italianate palazzo—it occupies a former railroad station, a one-time union hall, several renovated industrial buildings, a former women’s hospital (where, as it happens, this reporter was born), and a 2003 academic building that looks like a geometry problem being solved in glass.

The building includes a block of studios (left).

Now the college is about to open its latest structure, a sparkling 215-bed residence hall called the Gateway that seems certain to attract attention. Designed by RTKL Associates, the nine-story building will offer students not only expansive views of the city but also a private third-story courtyard with plenty of seating, big planters of bamboo, and neighborhood views through cutouts in the building. Besides 63 apartments, the building has a nine-story block of student studios that are complete with sinks and high-powered ventilation. A career center occupies part of the second floor, and the first floor has a 260-seat black-box theater that opens onto gallery space and a cafe.

The building, which cost $28-million to construct, is the result of a 2004 competition involving teams of architects from seven RTKL offices. The winning design was created by two designers in the firm’s London office, Grant Armstrong and Christy Wright. Despite their distance from the site, they created a striking building for a challenging location—it’s bordered on one side by an expressway and on two others by broad, busy streets that offer only occasional hints that this was once an elegant Victorian neighborhood.

The design was then modified by architects in RTKL’s Baltimore office. Changes including toning down the exterior color scheme, eliminating a spiral stairway in the courtyard, and substituting fretted glass for translucent concrete as the skin for the studio block.

The result is a building that in ways both subtle and clever balances the college’s needs nicely against the community’s. Openings in the building’s main drum allow passersby to glimpse the interior and frame the best views for the students inside, so that the building feels open to the city around it—as indeed it is, since the cafe and gallery will welcome the public. At the same time, the building downplays the site’s less appealing views and cuts down traffic noise, and a carefully-sited guard desk offers security without seeming heavy-handed.

The building also benefits from an appealing landscape design, by Higgins-Lazarus Landscape Architecture, that uses graceful berms and a concrete wall with a built-in fountain to create a ground-level outdoor space that’s shielded from traffic but open to the neighborhood.

The building’s apartments, with 16 different floorplans, are three- and four-bedroom units with kitchens and living rooms. The bedrooms, each different from the next, are singles with large windows in the building’s exterior, and one wall of each room is a giant tackboard. The furniture was designed for the building by Artelier Design, and is intended to be flexible enough to meet art students’ needs. The apartments have polished concrete floors and open into glass-enclosed corridors overlooking the courtyard.

The Gateway was not designed with LEED criteria in mind, but now that construction is complete, the college is seeking certification. An open house for the building is scheduled for Sunday. —Lawrence Biemiller

MICA Apartments open onto glass-enclosed corridors in the building’s interior.