In addition to gaining a new director, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University will have a new home when fall classes start Aug. 31.
Five years after construction began, faculty members and support staffers have moved into the institute’s new building at 3100 Wyman Park Drive.
It’s the first free-standing headquarters for the institute, which was established in 2017 after the Stavros Niarchos Foundation committed $150 million to launch an effort with Hopkins to build a multi-disciplinary academic and public forum dedicated to “strengthening democracy by improving civic engagement and civil discourse worldwide.” It draws its name from the Athenian agora, a forum for debate and deliberation in ancient Greece.
Hopkins officials announced this month that the university has selected sociologist Ruth Braunstein to serve as the new director starting Aug. 1. She replaces 2025 MacArthur Fellow Hahrie Han, who has led the institute since 2019 and will remain on the faculty of both the SNF Agora Institute and the university’s political science department.
The new building was constructed to house the offices, classrooms, labs and meeting spaces of the institute, whose faculty includes political scientists, sociologists, historians and scholars of international affairs and public health. The institute has 15 tenure-track faculty members; six teaching, research and practice faculty members, and at least 10 visiting fellows per academic year. They study the behavioral, organizational and institutional foundations of democracy; develop and test interventions to reverse trends toward decline and share lessons learned to promote civic engagement and inclusive dialogue.
In addition to faculty members such as Han; Louis Hyman; Henry Farrell; Adam Seth Levin and Martha Jones, senior fellows include former Maryland Senator Ben Cardin and journalist and historian Anne Applebaum. Former Maryland Rep. John Sarbanes is a Distinguished Practitioner in Residence.
The 11 visiting fellows for 2026-2027 are: writer and producer Lakeia Brown; journalist and editor Amy Choi; educator Christopher Carr; artist, researcher and preservation planner Marian April Glebes; WYPR senior news analyst Tom Hall; visual artist Tiffany Jones; composer and performer Molly Joyce; researcher Erica Schoder; writer and podcaster Jenna Spinelle; “civic artist” Richard Young and professor of science communication Shupei Yuan.
‘The spirit of the ancient agora’
The SNF Agora building “will serve as a hub for research, teaching and public dialogue,” the institute’s website says. “The space reflects the spirit of the ancient agora with areas for faculty labs, classrooms and community events. Its open, accessible design invites connection, collaboration and civic engagement…We seek to create agora-like spaces, critical to deliberative democracy.”
As designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop of Genoa, Italy – one of Baltimore’s Sister Cities – the building rises four stories, is clad in glass and has numerous irregular angles. It’s located next to the former Baltimore Marine Hospital that Hopkins owns and east of land where the university is constructing a two-building home for its Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Institute, expected to open in 2029.
The Agora building has two main sections: an area to the north for large gatherings, dubbed the Community Cube or Conversation Cube,and a second cube to the south that contains classrooms, labs and faculty offices, called The Factory. The two sections are connected by a circulation bridge or “spider,” and the northern cube is rotated at a 45-degree angle from the southern cube. Olin is the landscape architect.
While the Factory side is primarily for Hopkins faculty members, the community side is meant for use by the general public as well. It includes a flexible, two-story “convening space” that appears to float above ground and can host conferences, theater productions, banquets and other events. This meeting area is available to rent on its own or in combination with up to three break-out rooms. The Community Cube includes full catering capability and is attached to a café that can also be rented for special events.
Construction began in mid-2021 and was originally expected to be complete by the fall of 2024. Representatives have pointed to supply chain issues and other factors for the two-year delay. Hopkins president Ron Daniels said in 2025 that it has been the most difficult campus construction project he has ever worked on.
‘Transparency and openness and accessibility’
The glass exterior is a departure from the brick and precast stone exteriors of many other Hopkins buildings. During a recent presentation organized by The Architects Newspaper, designers said the glass exterior signals transparency, for both the institute and the structure that houses it. They noted that the glass curtain walls also give occupants sweeping views of the building’s natural surroundings, including the Stony Run watershed to the north, while also reflecting its setting.
Lee Coyle, the university’s senior director of planning and architecture, said in 2024 that Piano didn’t want to mimic the Georgian style architecture present on much of Hopkins’ Homewood campus. “The bricks and shutters didn’t go too far with him,” Coyle said of the 1998 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner, 88. “He didn’t want to work in that medium.”
“The story that we are telling with this building is a story of transparency and openness and accessibility,” Piano said in a video posted on the university’s website. Although it’s inspired by an ancient gathering space, he said, Hopkins’ Agora is “a building about the future.”
