Lofty Thinking Revitalizes a Johns Hopkins University Landmark
Kliment & Halsband’s design gives Gilman Hall an atrium that floats to the top

by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . renovate an early 20th century academic building while incorporating a glass-roofed atrium and sustainability practices?

Summary: Kliment & Halsband’s renovation for Johns Hopkins University’s Gilman Hall will gut the building’s wall and partitions and upgrade its interiors, as well as make it more sustainable. A light and buoyant glass-roofed atrium will cover a currently disused open space in the central block of the building. The renovation will increase the building’s usable academic space and reunite humanities programs that had previously left due to a lack of space.

Since 1986, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore had been considering renovations to its venerable Gilman Hall, home to the university’s Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Built in 1915, the building was overdue for basic nuts-and-bolts infrastructure renovations: lighting, HVAC, etc. But funding for these projects (likely to cost $10-14 million) was a continual problem. When it was to be finished, university officials couldn’t promise much more than a better functioning Gilman. After all the students and faculty were to be moved out and moved back in, the building would still look largely the same. That idea didn’t seem to inspire donors.

“It was always falling flat, because it was a ton of money for pipes and wires,” says Jim Miller, AIA, the senior director of design and construction for Johns Hopkins University.

So nothing was done—until a year and a half ago when New York-based R.M. Kliment & Frances Halsband Architects gave Johns Hopkins a wider vision meant to inspire: a comprehensive, room-to-room renovation that would give Gilman a three-story glass-roofed atrium and make it LEED® certified. This expanded vision proved to be a better fundraising draw, and the $73 million project will begin construction as soon as this school year ends.

The new, the old, and the green
Designed by 1893 Johns Hopkins graduate Douglas H. Thomas, Gilman hasn’t received much repair and redesign attention over its century-long history. Alex Diez, a partner at Kliment & Halsband, says small renovations were completed in the ‘50s and ‘60s that broke up large reading rooms, often to the detriment of the overall building. “That’s it,” he says. “It’s literally the same [original] finishes.”

The new renovations will gut all the walls, restore some of the larger open rooms, install windows with better thermal insulation, and add insulation to the roof and walls. To maintain the building’s sense of Georgian grandeur, its high ceilings were not lowered, even though new HVAC components will be installed behind them. The red brick exterior, with its front-facing clock tower and rear-facing rotunda, will remain largely untouched.

Diez hopes Gilman will qualify for LEED Silver certification when the building opens in the summer of 2010, and its design calls for recycled marble and wood components, high-efficiency light fixtures, and low-flow toilets. The plan’s site and renovation premise also provided low-hanging LEED fruit for the architects: There will be no new construction, a significant amount in internal infrastructure will be maintained, and Gilman Hall is close to public transportation.

The soft touch
Clearly, the project’s signature element is its glass-roofed atrium. Though Johns Hopkins never requested that the architects include this in their plans, Miller says all the designs for the final three shortlisted firms included an atrium. Kliment & Halsband’s atrium roof sits over what is now an open and unused lightwell in the four-story building’s central section. It spans 60 feet in a barrel-vaulted grid system of steel tubes supporting glass panels. Structural members are placed every five feet, and tensioned bracing cables are fastened to every tube-crossing node. Programmatically similar to AIA Gold Medal recipient Norman Foster’s atrium at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Gilman Hall atrium approaches its task with an airy subtlety, while Foster’s atrium is weighty and commanding. Unlike Foster’s larger atrium, the Gilman Hall structure has no columns, and its supports are only 4 inches in diameter and taper down to 2.5-3 inches. Birds-eye-view drawings make the glass roof appear as a floating cloud over the heavy masonry of Gilman Hall.

Diez says this lightness is the key to the atrium’s relationship with the century-old Georgian building to which it’s attached. “We’re harmonizing [with Gilman] by not making a huge impact on it,” he says. “We think that dematerializing the glass roof and making it almost disappear does it the most justice.”

Below the glass roof is a 3,000-square-foot courtyard and multipurpose lounge that will feature a coffee bar, lounge seating, and a new exhibit for the university’s archaeological collection. This collection display sits in the middle of the courtyard in a large block, surrounded by what Diez likens to a pedestrian “moat,” where students can view Greco-Roman and Near-Eastern artifacts. Inside the archaeological collection block are more ancient artifacts, and the roof of the exhibit houses public courtyard space and bridges that lead towards the front and rear of Gilman Hall. Fritting on some of the glass roof panels, as well as ultra-violet screening in the vitrines, protects sensitive artifacts from sunlight.

“The whole idea of introducing a modern infrastructure into an existing building that was not meant for that infrastructure, and doing it in a way that is sensitive to the original architecture, is probably one of the more challenging tasks,” says Diez.

Reunification
When these renovations are complete, space for academic programs will have increased from 49,000 square feet to 55,000 square feet, and 11 humanities programs will be pulled back into Gilman Hall, some of which had decamped for more spacious quarters years ago. This reunification is more than practical refocusing of academic programs for Johns Hopkins. As Miller says, it’s a reinstating of Gilman’s presence as a “core piece to the campus.”