Project Description
The Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School serves a wide variety of students from varied backgrounds. The school’s unique location in a waterfront office tower in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor East district offers opportunities and challenges for planning and design.
Hord Coplan Macht began working with the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School through a strategic planning study that analyzed the existing facilities, utilization rates, and then developed a programmatic and space strategy to advance the school’s mission. The strategic study made recommendations to meet the short, mid and long term needs of the school’s growth and expansion.
Recommendations included increasing the number of flexible classrooms, student study space, AV media production studios, and faculty and staff offices.
The classroom and student commons project grew out of the strategic study and includes flexible classrooms and collaboration and study space for students. We re-organized the school vertically. Student are on floors 1,2, half of 5 and 24. Staff is on levels 5 + 6 and faculty are on levels 12 and 13. This stratification of users was important to the school.
The classrooms are completely reconfigurable with movable acoustic glass partitions that allow the rooms to be used for active learning, conventional lecture, large lectures and special events of up to 420 people. Audio visual systems were incorporated with multiple configurations to support the varied layouts possible with the classrooms.
The student study areas have panoramic views and allow students to study in groups of four, pairs, or by themselves.