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December 09, 2008, 12:19 PM ET
Hopkins Plans a Library Addition, With Challenges to Overcome
The Johns Hopkins U. will expand its library. (Johns Hopkins U. image)
The Johns Hopkins University said Monday that it is planning a $30-million, six-and-a-half story library addition intended to create a high-tech “learning commons.” But it hasn’t yet chosen a design firm for the project — which might not be a surprise, given the design challenges involved.
Homewood House (Chronicle photo)
The university’s 1964 Milton S. Eisenhower Library, which faces a wide, leafy stretch of Baltimore’s iconic North Charles Street, was one of the first university libraries to bury its book stacks below grade. That’s because it sits right beside Homewood House, the 1801 landmark from which the university’s undergraduate campus takes its name and its architectural vocabulary. Homewood, now a museum, is essentially a one-story house sited at the top of a rise — and the Eisenhower Library, by the firm Wrenn, Lewis and Jencks, was designed not to overpower it.
The design vocabulary of the 1964 library is a Georgian version of Modernist, and four and a half stories of the building are underground. That won’t be the case with the addition, which will be able to take advantage of a grade change south of the existing structure. A rendering released by the university shows large windows looking out to the south and a cascade of stairs beside the building — but both are facing an area that is currently home to a loading dock and service-vehicle parking. Nearby is a dairy barn that once served Homewood House — it’s now a theater — and the university utility plant is slightly farther away.
So besides the usual challenges of adding to an existing structure, the library project will involve cleaning up a little traveled, long-overlooked area of the campus — a challenge many colleges have faced as they have tried to make the best use of space on crowded campuses. All in all, it’s quite a set of problems: A Georgian house, a Modernist library, a dairy barn, and a utility plant — it will be interesting to see the result, due to be opened in 2012.
Correction: Tracey Reeves, of the Hopkins news and information office, points out that I misread the rendering of the addition. It shows the east facade of the addition, not the south facade, so the big windows will be looking toward North Charles Street. The former dairy barn and the utility plant would be to the left in the rendering — still close enough to require attention, but not framed by the windows in the rendering.
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