2006 SCUP/AIA-CAE Awards

Honor Award for Excellence in Planning for an Established Campus

The 2001 Homewood Campus Master Plan at The Johns Hopkins University with Ayers/ Saint/Gross, Inc. from Baltimore, Maryland

Click to view a pdf presentation of the project.

Homewood is the northern Baltimore campus of The Johns Hopkins University. For nearly a century, the original 1914 master plan guided progress and produced a tree-lined enclave with two quadrangles and a grand circular drive from Charles Street, a north/south boulevard.

In the early 1980s, the 1914 master plan was all but built out. From that point, building was done without the framework or formwork that a campus master plan provides. The lack of a plan put the focus on building buildings as opposed to building a campus. The connectivity of spaces, the pedestrian nature of the core and the space making of buildings were all disappearing.

By 1999, the University was building or preparing to build on three of its perimeters and the campus had grown to house more than two million square feet of building space. A comprehensive master plan was imperative for thoughtful growth over at least the next two decades.

Planning objectives included placement of new buildings and additions; clarification of pedestrian and vehicular circulation systems; refinement of existing open spaces; and creation of new open spaces.

"The design for the central quadrangle was transforming," said juror Steve Troost. "The implementation on this project was very successful."

The plan recommended building sites for more than 1 million gross square feet of new space; control of vehicular and service traffic on the core campus; reestablishment of a pedestrian core, revitalization of the campus woodlands and stream valley; and reconnection with the college town of Charles Village.

The quality of the plan is evident in the quality of campus making that it guided. Since implementation, five buildings have been built on sites identified in the plan.

The resulting campus is of the same high quality that was built from the 1914 master plan. The scale of these new buildings works to make spaces that reconnect the campus in a way that respects the pedestrian nature of the place but accommodates the needs of a 21st century university.

Additionally, three buildings and a multi-level underground parking deck with a turf quadrangle above are under construction. The garage and two of the buildings form Decker Quadrangle, the largest development of landscape and building since the construction of Gilman Hall and the two original quadrangles, Wyman and Keyser.

For the Decker Quad area, the master plan described an open-ended quadrangle as the face that is presented to visitors. During the Decker Quad concept phase the design team decided it was better to present the visitor with a building.

The concept of a serene, pedestrian-friendly campus with a signature design was quickly endorsed by the Hopkins community. In the five years since the completion of the Plan in 2001, eight new buildings (782,700 gsf) have been built or are under construction, two existing buildings have been renovated, nearly the entire core campus landscape has been rejuvenated and extended, pedestrian/vehicular conflicts have been minimized by simplifying and restricting on-campus traffic, and the overall appearance of campus has been restored to its historic elegance.

The Johns Hopkins University campus master plan is successful for the simple reason that it is about building campus not building buildings. That has been demonstrated with the buildings that are either constructed or under construction and the campus that they create.

Project Team

Mark Demshak
Director of Architecture and Planning
Office of Facilities Management
The Johns Hopkins University
demshak@jhu.edu

Luanne Greene
Ayers/Saint/Gross, Inc.
lgreene@asg-architects.com