A plan by the University of Baltimore to build a new “Center for Learning” cleared a key hurdle on Wednesday when a committee of the University System of Maryland Board of Regents approved a 10-Year Facilities Master Plan for the midtown campus.
Under the proposed master plan for 2024 to 2034, the university’s Academic Center in the 1400 block of North Charles Street would be torn down and replaced with a smaller structure designed to be more energy- and cost-efficient and provide teaching spaces that better suit the ways its students will want to learn in the future.
The master plan was approved with little discussion on Wednesday by the Board of Regents’ Committee on Finance, which had a detailed presentation in September. The master plan still needs approval from the full Board of Regents before it’s officially adopted. The full Board of Regents is expected to consider it on Nov. 22.
In addition to the new Center for Learning, the 10-year master plan calls for the University of Baltimore to shift much of its administrative space to an office building at 101 W. Mount Royal Avenue that the university is leasing with an option to purchase from The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore. The four-story, 36,000-square-foot building served as headquarters for The Associated until the organization relocated to Park Heights Avenue earlier this year. It has been renamed the UBalt Welcome Center.
Other recommendations in the master plan are: improving the public realm, including streets and plazas, and making interior and exterior changes to seven other structures on the core campus. For example, the master plan notes that a study is under way to evaluate the benefits of moving the university library’s Special Collections and Archives from the Turner Learning Commons to renovated space in the Charles Royal Building at the southeast corner of Charles Street and Mount Royal Avenue.
“The 2024 UBalt Ten-Year Facilities Master Plan aligns the vision for UBalt’s physical campus in Midtown Baltimore with the University’s mission and strategic goals and the needs and preferences of its students,” states a summary presented to the Committee on Finance. “The Plan identifies a prioritized set of capital projects that will right-size the campus by reducing Gross Square Footage (GSF), modernize and enhance the teaching, learning, and working environment to better foster academic success, remediate significant deferred maintenance and renew underperforming buildings, implement energy performance and decarbonization requirements, improve campus identity and pedestrian safety, and contribute to the continued revitalization of Midtown and the neighborhoods near Penn Station.” In all, the plan affects approximately 871,000 gross square feet of space across eight buildings, the summary states.
Three interconnected buildings
The Academic Center is the largest single structure on the University of Baltimore campus – actually three interconnected buildings that together occupy much of a full city block near Baltimore’s Penn Station.
The buildings that make up the Academic Center include a structure once known as The Garage, which dates from 1905-1906 and features large windows fronting on Charles Street and Mount Royal Avenue; a former hotel that rises six stories and dates from 1905, and a four-story annex at the north end of the block that was constructed in 1961.
The Garage is the former headquarters and showroom of the Mar-Del Mobile Company, the first location where Cadillacs were sold in Baltimore and former home of the Maryland Automobile Club. It’s also one of the earliest reinforced-concrete structures in Baltimore and one of the first local buildings influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie-style architecture.
The master plan states that the replacement structure would provide about 134,000 gross square feet of space, or about 60 percent as much as the Academic Center, which has 226,387 gross square feet of space. Officials say the exact size of the replacement will be determined during a phase of programmatic planning that hasn’t begun yet.
Temporary home for City College
Before the University can build the proposed learning center, administrators plan to lease space in the Academic Center to the city of Baltimore for three years. The city’s school board plans to use space in that building and the university’s William H. Thumel Sr. Business Center to provide a temporary home for Baltimore City College students and teachers while their building at 3220 The Alameda undergoes renovation for three years.
The university’s plan calls for City College to relocate to the University of Baltimore campus from August 2025 to August 2028. Once the City College renovations are complete, the high school students and teachers will move back to The Alameda, enabling the university to move ahead with its long-range plans.
Campus leaders say they plan to use the period when City College is occupying the Academic Center to finalize plans for the replacement project and line up funding. They say the target date for completion of a new campus building is sometime in the early 2030s.
While the finance committee’s action on Wednesday represented an important step in planning for the university’s proposed Center for Learning and other changes to the midtown campus, it is not the final step.
Committee members were told that approval of the master plan does not imply approval of specific capital projects within the master plan, or their funding. According to state officials, individual projects such as the Center for Learning still must go to the Board of Regents separately for funding approval and will be subject to the state’s standard capital and operating budget review processes.
