Mattin Center
Baltimore, Maryland
Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects

A creative arts center demonstrates a principled approach for fitting modern forms into the landscape

© Michael Moran

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

By Suzanne Stephens

With its design for a new creative arts center at Johns Hopkins, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects confronted evidence of a strong case of Jeffersonitis, a condition affecting much southeast American campus architecture. The campus’s two existing quadrangles, characterized by the type of neo-Georgian brick-and-white-trim architecture of Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, date back to 1914, when the first buildings of a master plan by Parker and Thomas, of Boston and Baltimore, were finished.

A third quad-in-the-making seems to be maintaining the loyalty to the vocabulary. In such a setting, a Modern building can look as if a UFO landed among the halls of ivy. Williams and Tsien, however, demonstrate that a Modernist approach can give a campus a new identity without destroying its character.

The site for the arts center occupies 1.5 acres of a slope at the southeastern end of the campus, edged by a main thoroughfare on the east side, a power plant to the west, and a densely wooded sculpture garden that belongs to the Baltimore Museum of Art on the south.

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien developed a scheme with three wings, in which two branches spill gradually down the slope as it drops 32 feet in grade. The third short wing, for a theater and café, in effect bridges the two on the upper side of the hill, creating an open piazza in the area enclosed by the angled arms. The brick buildings, with a series of stairs, ramps, decks, and interior passages that connect various painting and digital arts spaces as well as dance studios, act as exterior gateways, interior pathways, and meeting places for students coming to the center. "We wanted to create both a nexus for student interaction and a connector to various activities," Williams explains.

The poured-in-place-concrete structure and its retaining walls at the base of the buildings gradually give way to steel square-tube columns and beams and sandblasted, double-paned glass walls at the top. But the dominant brick material bears a strong resemblance to the kind Alvar Aalto employed in his Town Hall at Säynätsalo in 1952.

Two kinds of brick are used for the center, both of which show a certain affinity to that of the older Johns Hopkins architecture. Although most of these neo-Georgian buildings are built of Flemish bond, Williams and Tsien chose a ruddy, solid, running bond, but with the rough wood-molded texture of the the university’s original brick. Alternating with the solid red brick is an extruded brick, custom-speckled with a gray glaze to pick up the dark color of the headers in the university’s Flemish bond.

See the August 2002 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project.

Formal name of Project:
Mattin Center, Johns Hopkins University

Location:
Baltimore

Gross square footage:
50,000 sq. ft.

Total construction cost:
$13.6 million

Client:
Johns Hopkins University

Architect:
Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects
222 Central Park South
New York, NY 10019
Tel 212.582.2385
Fax 212.245.1984
www.twbta.com