‘Social by design’: Johns Hopkins University students get their first look at the $250 million Bloomberg Student Center

Johns Hopkins University students got a chance to explore the new Bloomberg Student Center this week during a celebratory preview event on the first day of fall classes.

On Monday, hundreds of students and other Hopkins affiliates spent more than two hours roaming around the four-story, 150,000-square-foot building, which is not yet fully operational and will be opening in phases over the next several weeks. Located at 3290 N. Charles Street, just off the university’s main entrance drive and the grassy open space known as The Beach, it’s the first dedicated student center ever built on the Homewood campus.  

The event started with a pep rally of sorts on a new landscaped plaza facing Charles Street. Students and others then moved inside to get a first look at the $250 million facility, which has been under construction for more than three years. University President Ronald Daniels and other top administrators and trustees were present, but there were no speeches or formal ceremonies. That will come later in the fall. For Monday’s preview, visitors took self-guided tours of the building and discovered its features on their own.

What they saw is a place that’s unlike anything else on campus, or anywhere else in the city. On the outside, it’s a sleek, modern, seemingly low-slung, metal-clad building that stands out on a campus known for its neo-Georgian architecture and orderly quadrangles. Inside it opens up to reveal a large central atrium that leads to a variety of non-academic spaces – a food hall, a theater, an E-game lounge, reservable multipurpose rooms and more.

‘Warm and friendly’

The student center blends elements of many different building types – an urban mall, a museum, a stadium — but it’s different from any of them. The horizontal lines of the exterior don’t prepare visitors for the soaring atrium inside. It’s a bright and welcoming space, with floor-to-ceiling windows that let in plenty of natural light.  

This is one of the first buildings in Baltimore to feature a heavy timber structural system over a concrete foundation, and the exposed wood columns and beams help impart a sense of warmth that steel or poured concrete couldn’t provide.

“Timber, for a building of this scale, is almost unbeatable,” said lead architect Bjarke Ingels of the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), in a 2023 interview. “The bones of the building – the columns, the beams, the slabs – are beautiful in their own right. Without any material finishes, they are by themselves beautiful.” Besides giving the building a “warm and friendly feeling,” Ingels noted, the use of a renewable resource such as wood “reduces the carbon footprint of the building dramatically.”

‘Social by design’

Named after Hopkins graduate and benefactor Michael Bloomberg, Class of 1964, the student center was constructed to provide a central gathering spot for a university campus that never had a traditional student union. From 1916 to 1929, notes the JHU Hub, the closest thing Hopkins had to a student hangout was a barber shop and snack bar in Merrick Barn, a converted dairy barn. Students have made various attempts to turn Levering Hall into a student union.  

Daniels, now in his 17th year as Hopkins’ president, led the effort to raise private funds for the facility, one of the largest and most expensive on the Homewood campus. He saw it as a way to help Hopkins compete with peer institutions that were building amenities for their students.

“As the needs of our student body have evolved, so has the desire for a different and dedicated student center taken hold,” Daniels wrote in a 2019 message to the Hopkins community, in which he announced plans to move forward with the project and seek philanthropic support. “This will be a new kind of space for us – one that is not academically focused, but entirely social by design…It will be a site to which everyone lays equal claim and from which everyone benefits.”

Where gown meets town

Hopkins programmed the building with the mix of spaces students said they wanted – areas for socializing, arts programs, dining, student resources and support services – and hired noted architects to design it. In addition to BIG, known forits unconventional, environmentally-friendly designs, the team included Rockwell Group for interior architecture; Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates as the landscape architect and Shepley Bulfinch as the architect of record. Clark Construction Group is the lead contractor.

The site was a hill previously occupied by Mattin Center, a three-building arts complex designed by Tod Williams Bille Tsien Architects for a key point where town meets gown on one of the city’s major boulevards. Instead of setting the student center high above street level the way Mattin Center was, the architects proposed cutting into the hill and creating a structure that comes down to Charles Street and opens up to the adjacent Charles Village neighborhood.

The building is set at a 45-degree angle to the city street grid and to most other buildings on campus – one reason it stands out so prominently. Its angled walls align, however, with those of the Baltimore Museum of Art’s 1929 building by John Russell Pope and Art Museum Drive to the south.

Architecturally, the student center was conceived of as a series of interlocking volumes cascading down the hill, forming a bridge from Hopkins’ campus to the neighboring residential community and business district. The flat roof of each ‘volume’ supports solar panels for energy efficiency, and the different roof heights and sizes hint at what’s taking place in the spaces below.

Because it’s set into a hill, the student center has entrances on every level, and that makes it unusually porous. It has no backside. There’s no one right way to move around inside. Though large, it’s an accessible building with a simple-to-grasp layout and sophisticated detailing.

The atrium is the chief organizing element. It’s filled with a combination of steps and bleacher-like seating. The steps provide the main way to get from one level to another while the tiered seating rows give visitors plenty of places to sit down while they check their cell phone messages or work on a laptop or just take in the view. It’s a design strategy that turned circulation corridors into useful gathering spaces at Hopkins’ Bloomberg Center in Washington, D. C., and has been expanded in Baltimore.

The edges that frame the central atrium offer balcony-like perches that make it even more of a people watcher’s paradise. It promises to be a popular spot for students to meet before meals and classes or just hang out for a bit of face time – the place to see and be seen.

Learning curve

On Monday, wayfinding signs were placed around the building to show the activities on each level. The first floor contains the food hall, called Ralph’s Marketplace, and the 200-seat theater. The second floor has the Welcome Desk, a huddle room, a small conference room, multipurpose rooms and a Student Project Exhibit Lounge. Level three has more huddle rooms, the E-game lounge, a recording studio, sound studios and a full-service restaurant named Mo’s Place, after 1957 Hopkins graduate Morris Offit. Level four has a Creative Media Center, a Creative Studio, a Student Engagement Hub and more multipurpose rooms.

Some students at the kickoff event were playing Foosball; others were taking impromptu dance lessons. Every area has a different feel. One memorable space is a high-ceilinged dance studio with windows that offer views of the BMA’s Wurtzburger and Levi sculpture gardens to the south. The 96-seat restaurant, the only place on campus with a seven-day liquor license, features a display of sports memorabilia. A wall of the student lounge serves as a showplace for student art. The food hall is illuminated by colorful hanging lanterns that are reminiscent of Vessel Field, artist Kendall Buster’s nine pottery-shaped lanterns suspended from the atrium ceiling inside Gilman Hall.

For now, the student center is only open to Hopkins affiliates, so they can get acclimated to it and operators can work out any bugs. The theater will host its first production on Aug. 29. Five food vendors and the third-level restaurant will be introduced in the next few weeks. Hopkins officials plan eventually to open the building to the general public, once they’ve seen it in action for a while.  

“Since we’ve never had a place on campus like this…we felt like we needed to learn how the students use this building before we open the doors for the community,” associate vice provost for strategic student initiatives Lee Hawthorne told The Johns Hopkins News Letter. “The intention is to learn how to operate it.”