The National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) has chosen Baltimore to host its annual conference, bringing together more than 1,500 minority architects from around the country for a five-day summit in Charm City.

The 12 local young architects organizing the conference will highlight the housing, entertainment, and community projects making Baltimore the unique and exciting city it is for learning, living, and exploring.

The annual meeting takes place from Wednesday, Oct. 23 – Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024 and is sold out. NOMA is a 50-year-old organization with 25 chapters around the United States. Baltimore’s chapter began in 2017 with just five members and boasts over 100 members today.

In addition to attending sessions designed around the topics of design; technical; community and justice; business; and “Hey, Smalltimore!”, there will be numerous networking events held around the city and keynotes featuring esteemed and groundbreaking minority architects on topics as broad as bridging continents to focused topics like underserved communities in Baltimore.

“With over 45-chapter cities to choose from to host our national conference, we are excited to be in Baltimore to honor its place in design history as well as it’s emerging community-inspired design programs. It is in cities like these where we want to gather, exchange local ideas that can make a national impact, and lift up our mission and members,” said Tiffany Brown, MBA, NOMA, Assoc. AIA, NOMA Executive Director. “From the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of African American History and Culture – designed by our former NOMA architecture colleague Philip Freelon, to the legacy of Morgan State University as the only Historically Black College and University in Maryland where we have an amazing student chapter, we are pleased to be here, engaged with the emerging design leadership in Charm City.” 

Some of the networking events include a private White House tour; a reception at Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture (designed by Philip Freelon, a late NOMA member, after whom the professional design awards are named); a graduate fair expo with 70+ exhibitors; tours around Baltimore including the Baltimore Art Museum, Lexington Market, Camden Yards Sports Complex Stadium Tour, and more.

The NOMA Awards Banquet will be held on Friday to honor exceptional leadership, elevate NOMA members moving to the NOMA Council (NOMAC), and recognize award-winning work of NOMA professional and student members. These awards are sponsored by national architecture firms HDR, SOM and Stantec.

Over 80 firms applied to this year’s Phil Freelon Professional Design Awards. Baltimore is home to several buildings designed by Freelon and his firm, including the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, and the Center for the Built Environment and Infrastructure Studies (CBEIS) at Morgan State University, the only Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Maryland with an accredited architecture program.

Melanie Ray, president of NOMA’s Baltimore chapter and the northeast university liaison for NOMA’s national board, spoke to Baltimore Fishbowl about some of the architectural design trends, their emphasis on design justice and accessibility, and what NOMA is doing to increase architecture studies to HBCUs nationwide.

Ray explained that attendees of the conference do not have to be members.

“We do have a lot of our conference attendees this year are either sponsors or allied professionals,” she said. “In some cases, they’re allied individuals who just support the mission of the organization to truly champion diversity within architecture and related professions.”

Since Ray sits on both the local and national boards of NOMA, she was able to speak to the organization’s involvement in HBCUs on both levels. Locally, NOMA partners with Morgan State University, since it has an architecture program (the student chapters are called NOMAS) and over 20 Morgan students are attending this year.

“We partner with them throughout the year,” Ray explained. “We co-host events with them. We invite them to our organization’s events. We do portfolio reviews. We really try to ensure that our NOMAS members have a direct connection to the professional community within Baltimore, so that when they graduate, they’ve got a job, they’ve got connections and mentorship.”

Beyond Morgan State University, NOMA has student chapters at all seven HBCUs that have architecture programs. NOMA has an HBCU professional development program that partners students with professionals for virtual membership opportunities. Additionally, this year, national president Pascale Sablan will visit all seven of the HBCUS with architecture programs.

Ray said NOMA approaches everything through the lens of design justice when it comes to accessibility, affordable housing, and planning. Since she does work in affordable housing, and those projects are federally funded, the emphasis is on universal design as the basis for all spaces. Universal design, according to the National League of Cities, “prioritizes usability by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialization.”

“There’s actually seven key features as it relates to universal design, and we’re seeing more and more jurisdictions incorporate this into their design requirements for new buildings,” Ray said. “We are seeing a heavier focus on designing spaces that accommodate everyone, without heavy adaptation or changes that often make people feel like these changes are inconveniencing other people or going above and beyond. But if you design spaces from the beginning to be accessible to all, then you don’t have to worry about that being an afterthought later.”

Speaking about justice, Ray exuded enthusiasm for kicking off the Baltimore NOMA conference at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture. “It’s a really iconic building, from the outside, the graphics, even to the ‘Black History Matters’ letters that are on the front,” Ray said. “Just kind of really highlighting that as the keynote of the conference.”

One year after Johns Hopkins University dedicated its $647.5 million Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., leaders are unveiling part of the building that hasn’t been open before, the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery.

Named for two longtime art patrons and Hopkins benefactors, the gallery is a 1000-square-foot space that will present rotating exhibitions in line with the center’s mission to foster dialogue around the arts and democracy.

The inaugural exhibition, which opens along with the gallery on Wednesday, Oct. 23, is entitled “Art and Graphic Design of the European Avant-Gardes.” It brings together 75 rare works of art, books and ephemera spanning the Eastern European avant-garde movements from 1910 to 1941, including Futurism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism and Surrealism.

In tandem with the gallery opening, Hopkins announced that it is launching an arts-oriented lecture series in D.C. in 2025 and that it recently added two works of art to a contemporary art gallery on its East Baltimore medical campus.

Dedicated on Oct. 19, 2023, the Hopkins Bloomberg Center is a multidisciplinary academic facility that was created using the shell of the former Newseum building at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. N. W. Hopkins built it to bring under one roof its Washington-based programs that were previously located in several buildings, to extend its visibility and reach in the nation’s capital, and to maximize the impact of its research and scholarship.

Designed by Rockwell Group, the gallery will present exhibitions drawn from the university’s collections, and special exhibitions born out of partnerships with leading museums and collections. Design of the gallery and inaugural exhibition was overseen by Dan Kershaw, senior exhibition designer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first gallery director is Caitlin Berry, formerly the inaugural director of the Rubell Museum D. C.

Hopkins scheduled a day of festivities and a press preview on Tuesday for the inaugural exhibit, which is free and open to the public. Starting Oct. 23, gallery hours are Tuesday to Friday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and closed on university holidays. The inaugural exhibit will remain on view until Feb. 21, 2025.

The preview included a panel discussion with D.C. based-arts leaders on “Why Art is Essential to Democracy,” followed by a reception. Preceding the panel discussion was a “Music for Freedom” concert featuring Peabody Institute students performing works by Dmitri Shostakovich and Ludwig van Beethoven.  

The exhibition includes works by El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Lajos Kassak, Karel Teige and Victo Brauner. Several of the works have not previously been on public display in North America. The exhibition draws parallels between abstract works across geographic boundaries and linguistic differences, revealing ways in which avant-garde artists engaged in an international exchange of ideas to bring about new visual vocabularies in a modern, post-war age.

“We are deeply grateful to Irene and Richard Frary for their support of the Hopkins Bloomberg Center and their significant contribution to our mission to connect the worlds of research, and the arts,” said Cybele Bjorklund, the center’s executive director, in a statement. “Through its opening exhibition, programming, and future presentations, the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery will bring a fresh infusion of artistic expression and cultural dialogue to Pennsylvania Avenue. We invite our neighbors throughout the Washington community to discover the diverse array of free public events and concerts at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center.”

The exhibition draws from the Frarys’ rarely-seen private collection of art and literature and includes many recent gifts from the collection to the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries. Highlights include photography and photomontages from avant-garde artists impacted by preceding art movements, as well as works from lesser-known avant-garde publishing cultures in Armenia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia, including a large group of rare avant-garde and modernist books in Yiddish and Hebrew.

“The juxtaposition of art from across the continent allows viewers to uncover commonalities between each of the five ‘isms,’ painting a more complex picture of artistic movements previously defined by nationality and enabling a better understanding of a time marked by major political, social, and cultural transformations,” said exhibition curator Philipp Penka, in a statement. “The Frarys’ remarkable collection offers a glimpse at one of the defining periods in European modernism. It makes visible a complex international network spanning from Paris and Berlin to the Baltics, the Caucasus, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and modern-day Ukraine, and reveals the avant-garde’s shared concern with uncovering the contradictions of an obsolete societal order, and to give shape to a more just and truthful society.”

The works on display include:

• Liubov Popova’s 6 graviur L. Popovoi (1917), a suite of multi-color linocut prints;
• One of only five copies of UNOVIS (1920), an anthology published by artists in Vitebsk, Belarus, that includes several works on paper by El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich;
• Hungarian artist Lajos Kassák’s Bildarchitektur [Picture Architecture] (1925), a 1927 india ink drawing (Composition), and a very early woodcut (1921);
• One of three known copies of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s “Composition 73,” a color lithograph printed by the Weimar Bauhaus workshops for Adolf Behne, Der Sieg der Farbe (Berlin, 1924);
• An untitled Suprematist artist book by Ivan Puni (1920);
• Dutch artist Lou Loeber’s cardboard box object with multi-color geometrical gouache design in the manner of De Stijl (1920s);
• Three original photo collages by Crimean-born graphic artist, designer, and actor Petr Galadzhev.

Irene Frary is a member of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s advisory board. Richard Frary, a member of Hopkins’ Class of 1969, has provided leadership at the university through advisory board service, and as vice chair emeritus of its Board of Trustees and chair emeritus of the Sheridan Libraries National Advisory Council.

The Frarys are avid art and book collectors with more than 3,000 objects across diverse artistic movements, and they have shared their collections with the Hopkins community. They further support Johns Hopkins through scholarship and endowment support.  

“This inaugural exhibition of major works from the Frary Collections provides an unprecedented opportunity to explore a major artistic period in a new and innovative way,” said Daniel H. Weiss, Homewood Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and president emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “Through its thoughtful and ambitious program, the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery attests to the vitality and importance of the arts at the Bloomberg Center and at Johns Hopkins.”

“Irene and I are delighted to be a part of the first of many thought-provoking presentations at the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery that will inspire new conversations, ideas, and research through art,” said Richard Frary, a Class of 1969 Hopkins alumnus, donor and volunteer leader for more than 40 years “It is our hope that this exhibition, which cumulates a diversity of artistic and ideological perspectives, will advance the Hopkins Bloomberg Center’s mission to foster discovery, democracy, and global dialogue.”

Sam Gilliam Lecture Series

Hopkins officials this week announced that the university is launching The Sam Gilliam Lecture Series, which will be hosted starting in March 2025 at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C.

The series is being created with the Sam Gilliam Foundation to honor the artistic legacy and social justice commitments of the late Washington D.C.-based painter, sculptor and educator Sam Gilliam, who died in 2022 at age 88. Made possible by the foundation’s support, the series will welcome prominent artists and speakers to the Bloomberg Center to reflect on the intersections between contemporary art, academia, and public policy, and the role art plays in advancing society. Speakers will be announced at a later date. According to Hopkins’ announcement in The Hub, The Sam Gilliam Lecture Series will focus on topics in keeping with the themes and issues addressed in the artist’s life and work, including racial equity, democracy, and the transformative power of art. Consistent with the Bloomberg Center’s mission of connecting knowledge and research with policymaking, the series will provide a platform for contemporary artists and policymakers to engage in meaningful conversations about the role of art in addressing critical social issues.

“We are grateful to Annie Gawlak and the Sam Gilliam Foundation for their support and partnership on this series, which fits perfectly with the Hopkins Bloomberg Center’s mission,” said Bjorklund, the center’s executive director. “The series will create synergies between policy development and the arts, supporting important multidisciplinary conversations on key topics that will complement the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery, permanent art installations, and myriad arts programs hosted at the center.”

Tupelo, Mississippi, Gilliam was a pioneering Black artist renowned not only for his innovations in post-war American art, but also his commitment to issues of social justice, racial equity, and democratizing access to art. Having moved to Washington, D.C. in 1962 and living there throughout his prolific artmaking career, Gilliam had a long-standing and deep relationship with the city throughout the Civil Rights movement and other periods of extreme change in the nation.

The Bloomberg Center is home to a permanent, large-scale acrylic and mixed media installation by Gilliam, entitled A Lovely Blue And ! (2022). Measuring eight feet by 20 feet, it’s one of the final works created by the artist in the months before his death.

“Our partnership with Johns Hopkins University on this ongoing public program at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center highlights the role that contemporary art can play in advancing social and racial equity and supporting democracy,” said Gawlak, president of the Sam Gilliam Foundation, in a statement. “Throughout his life, Sam’s work lay at the intersection of art and advocacy, and he believed ardently in the ability of art to inspire and influence critical change. It is an honor to launch The Sam Gilliam Lecture Series in continuation of the activism Sam enacted throughout his career as an artist and educator.”

Works by Latoya Hobbs, Ernest Shaw Jr., and SHAN Wallace

In East Baltimore, Hopkins this month unveiled new paintings to its contemporary art collection in the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s North Gallery: “Sistership,’ by Latoya Hobbs, and ‘Crossing Godz 5’ by Ernest Shaw Jr. Both artists are Baltimore-based.

Hobbs’ painting uses vivid hues of green, gold, and brown to depict two Black women sharing an embrace while turned away from the viewer. In his painting, Shaw depicts two young squeegee workers who also have their arms around each other and their faces obscured. “Though they look out directly from the canvas, outlines of West African masks hide their features and elevate them to royalty,” notes author Aleyna Renta in a Hub article about the works. “To complete the image of nobility, the two boys hold their squeegees like scepters.

“Let me just say how thrilled I am to have these pieces here,” Bloomberg School of Public Health Dean Ellen MacKenzie said at the unveiling ceremony. “The art on our walls is an expression of the values we cherish. They show us the joy of human connection and reflect the power of Baltimore’s artistic voices. They are a lasting testament to the connection between our school and our city, and a very strong reminder that we want that connection to continue to deepen and to grow.”

The paintings were installed as part of the university’s new public arts initiative, which aims to uplift promising Baltimore artists and reflect the broader community by housing their works on Hopkins’ campuses. The effort, which involved an initial investment of $500,000 over two years and includes plans for future acquisitions, is an outgrowth of the university’s Diverse Names and Narratives Project. Hopkins’ Art Collecting Committee, made up of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and trustee representatives, selected the works from an artist portfolio curated by BmoreArt consultants Cara Ober and Inés Sanchez de Lozada.

Hopkins’ public arts initiative began with the installation of two black and white photographs by East Baltimore native SHAN Wallace. More artists are slated to have works displayed at the university, including painter Linling Lu, sculptor Sebastian Martorana, and photographer Elena Volkova.

Representatives of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) held a ceremonial groundbreaking on Thursday for their next major campus building, a $120 million, six-story home for the School of Social Work at 600 W. Lexington Street.

The 127,000-square-foot building will consolidate the school’s Master of Social Work and Doctor of Philosophy programs, which are currently spread across three locations. Planners say it will be the first net-zero emissions building within the University System of Maryland and the first in downtown Baltimore, with features such as geothermal wells, solar panels and a green roof.

The construction site is bounded by Saratoga Street on the north, Greene Street on the east, Lexington Street on the south and Pearl Street on the west. It’s currently an empty lot on the north end of the UMB campus on the west side of downtown, between Lexington Market and the old Metro West complex, part of which is being converted to a new home for the Maryland Department of Health. It’s within easy walking distance of the state’s subway and light rail line and several parking garages.

Ballinger of Philadelphia is the architect and Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. is the builder. Plans call for a mix of research, teaching and gathering spaces, including 10 classrooms; two media labs; six simulation rooms; 13 conference rooms; 16 small meeting rooms; 27 huddle rooms; a coffee lounge; bike racks; showers; a foot-washing station; a prayer and meditation room; a lactation space; and a large multi-purpose event space for education and community outreach.

More than 200 people attended the groundbreaking event, where speakers touted the building’s sustainability features and said it will be a center for academic, community and civic engagement. School of Social Work Dean Judy Postmus said it represents “the future of social work” and was designed “with social work values in mind.”

The new school “will be more than just a place to develop the next generation of social workers, leaders and scholars – it will be a vibrant community hub where students, faculty and local partners come together,” she said. “I am enthusiastic that these adaptable spaces embrace social work’s core values of social justice, the importance of human relationships and service to the community, by going above and beyond in areas of sustainability and accessibility.”

UMB president Bruce Jarrell said moving the school to Lexington Street will align with and bolster efforts by city and state planners to revitalize the west side of downtown.  He said the School of Social Work will lead a new wave of activity and construction over the next several years on the north end of campus, where the university is working with private developers to convert spaces to housing, stores and research space.

“This is a new beehive of activity that’s going to happen at UMB over the next couple of years and Social Work will be at the very center of it,” he said. “I hope in the next several years, concurrently with the development of this building, that you will see other activity there in terms of new development, developers and people on the street. That’s the idea about this north campus.”

Jarrell suggested that School of Social Work students and faculty will benefit by being close to the future home of Maryland’s health department, which is moving from State Center: “There might just be some useful interactions that take place there.”

He said he hopes that the school’s students and faculty will flourish in their new home.

“The fact that Social Work is the center of attention up here leads me to think I have great expectations of them,” he said. “I expect them to create new energy, new vibrancy, in this city that we love, Baltimore. I expect them to spread out their tentacles around this whole area and become an important element of change in Baltimore.”

With features such as a “high performance building envelope” and a usable roof garden, the building is expected to use 65 percent less energy than a traditional building of its size, and zero operational fossil fuels. Planners say they’re aiming to achieve LEED Gold certification and aspiring for LEED Platinum certification – the highest level awarded by the U. S. Green Building Council. In addition, they say, the project is tracking to earn LEED Net Zero Energy certification.

The new building “reflects UMB’s deep commitment to our core values of Well-Being and Sustainability,” Jarrell said. “From its green roof and geothermal walls to its net-zero energy design that will power learning and gathering spaces, this building exemplifies our mission to reduce UMB’s environmental impact while enhancing our campus and our connection to the surrounding community.”

The School of Social Work is one of six professional schools and an interdisciplinary School of Graduate Studies on the UMB campus. The School of Social Work has about 700 students and 80 full-time faculty members. Other programs include the Center for Restorative Change; Promise Heights Family Connections and The Institute for Innovation and Implementation.

According to Jarrell, more than 15,000 people are on the UMB campus on any given day, and another 9,000 people are in the University of Maryland Medical System’s buildings. After the ceremonial groundbreaking on Thursday, construction of the School of Social Work is expected to begin in December and be substantially complete in the summer of 2027.

Basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. has pledged $1 million to Morgan State University to support its Earl G. Graves School of Business & Management.

Johnson’s gift was announced during Morgan State’s 40^th Annual Homecoming Gala at Martin’s West earlier this month. According to university president David Wilson, the money will be used to endow a professorship in Entrepreneurship at the business school.

A National Basketball Association Hall of Famer who spent his entire career with the Los Angeles Lakers, Johnson is now the CEO of SodexoMagic, a food and facilities management provider that works with major corporations and institutions, including K-12 schools and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs.) The company has provided dining services at Morgan State since 2020 and was also a sponsor of its homecoming gala.

Johnson, 65, was unable to attend the gala in person, but his gift was announced at the event by SodexoMagic Vice President of Business Development and Account Management Donna Ford.

“As a preeminent HBCU, your dedication to addressing equity gaps and your rise in research prominence sets an inspiring example for institutions nationwide,” Ford said. “And like Morgan State University, SodexoMagic is committed to being a driving force for equity and change.”

Johnson was appearing at an event in Michigan with Vice President Kamala Harris at the same time as Morgan State’s gala, but he addressed the gathering in a video.

“Congratulations on 40 years of raising scholarship funds for students to attend the National Treasure,” he said in the video. “Please continue this great work so that the next generation of leaders are equipped to lead worldwide.”

Coppin State University is creating a direct pipeline for teachers of color to work with students with disabilities in Baltimore City and Harford County — offering free tuition and one-on-one mentorship.

Project POSE and Project SEQUEL, funded by a $2.3 million investment from the U.S. Department of Education, will recruit 40 current school staff or community college students from the two local districts over the next five years.

After two years of classes, participants will graduate with their bachelors degrees in special education — and be matched with a personal mentor during their first year leading a classroom.

Read more at WYPR.

Johns Hopkins University (JHU) will begin rolling out its electric buses in early 2025, thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the Maryland Energy Administration.

The new buses running along the Homewood-Peabody-JHMI route will be all-electric and fully accessible, helping the university meet the transportation and mobility goals of its “Climate Action and Sustainability Plan”. The first five buses replacing the university’s diesel fleet will cost approximately $5.5 million.

Each bus will earn a $40,000 tax rebate from federal Inflation Reduction Act incentives. An additional five buses should be added to the fleet by early 2027, and by 2030, all newly purchased university vehicles will be electric.

JHU currently runs 12 diesel buses along the Homewood-Peabody-JHMI route — its most visible. It carries more than 3,000 riders per weekday. Replacing the fleet with 10 all-electric buses will eliminate 741 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year.

Since transportation accounts for 25% of Baltimore’s greenhouse gas emissions, reducing them is a core aspect of JHU’s commitment to action on climate and environmental justice.

The buses will arrive in November, so that they may undergo the necessary processes of inspections, securing insurance, creating charging stations, and training drivers on the new vehicles in time for an early 2025 roll-out.

Up to 33 riders will be able to be seated around the perimeter of the bus facing the center, and up to 60 people can ride when some stand. The buses have mechanical lifts to give riders in wheelchairs easy access to the shuttle, and once inside, they will be able to use a self-operating locking system to hold their wheelchair in place when the bus is in motion.

The route runs from 6 a.m. – 12:30 a.m. on weekdays and has limited weekend service.

The JHU transportation team has worked closely with its counterparts in Baltimore City, which has a pilot program with electric buses, and at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where they have an electric bus program up and running. The introduction of the new electric shuttle buses at JHU are the culmination of years of planning on the part of Greg Smith, director of transportation services, and his team.

The life of any startup, especially in its earliest stages, moves fast and unexpectedly. Still, the process doesn’t require impulsively surrendering to the whims of unpredictable markets.

From finding the right problem to address to building up something sustainable, some near-universally sound practices can better ensure success, founders and early-stage employees said this week at Johns Hopkins University’s Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship. 

The Remington-based facility, renamed earlier this year to honor the late Johns Hopkins alum who helped create much of the school’s entrepreneurship support infrastructure, hosted the Tuesday evening event as part of its ongoing community programming for local entrepreneurs and university community members. 

Read more at Technical.ly

Students at Howard Community College (HCC) will soon have a sexual and reproductive health clinic that better meets their needs, thanks to a grant from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).

The Howard County Health Department (HCHD) received the grant from the IWPR Connect for Success Initiative to promote and increase student engagement with the clinic. Connect for Success is an initiative that aims to significantly increase community college students’ access to high-quality, comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care services and related supports.

“Many community college campuses across the country lack access to on-campus health services,” said Dr. Maura Rossman, Howard County Health Officer. “We have worked closely with County and HCC leadership to expand the sexual and reproductive health services available on campus. Now, we can use this opportunity to improve awareness of these comprehensive services and to make sure all students have access to high-quality care.”

In 2022, the HCHD Health Services team expanded the hours and services of its HCC Health Clinic, thanks to funding from the Howard County Government. Next, HCC students and staff will participate in a survey during the fall 2024 semester to assess how accessible these services are, and how much the students know about them.

There will also be activities with existing campus programs, student focus groups, recruiting student clinic champions, and expanding clinic branding.

“Two years ago, I announced a major $1 million investment to expand and prioritize preventative reproductive healthcare services at HCC, in order to ensure its students have improved access to the care they need,” said Howard County Executive Calvin Ball. “I want to thank Dr. Rossman, her staff and IWPR for further supporting the needs of our students and ensuring women have the right to make their own choices for their reproductive healthcare and family planning needs.”

“Every student deserves to be empowered by good information and quality guidance from caring experts when it comes to sensitive topics like sexual well-being,” said Howard Community College President Dr. Daria J. Willis. “I am so proud that Howard Community College will continue to partner with Howard County to expand reproductive and sexual health services and provide our students with care when they need it most.”

“Community college students, especially those representing historically marginalized communities, often face significant barriers to accessing the sexual and reproductive health care and resources they need,” said Dr. Jamila K. Taylor, president and CEO of IWPR. “Through Connect for Success, we are working to break down these barriers, ensuring that all students have the support they need to thrive academically and personally in order to succeed in life.”

Connect for Success is a two-year program, and grant amounts range from $25,000-$75,000 for the two-year period. HCHD was one of 11 recipients of funding through this initiative. The goal, according to the Connect for Success website, is “to increase community college students’ access to high-quality, comprehensive sexual and reproductive care, information, and resources, and improve their ability to manage their reproductive lives and succeed in college.”

Morgan State University’s Magnificent Marching Machine has been selected to perform in the 137^th Rose Parade in 2026.

This will be the university’s first performance in the iconic parade that takes place every January in Pasadena, California, and follows another groundbreaking first: the band’s participation in the annual D-Day memorial parade, the first-ever Historically Black College or University (HBCU) to do so. The band is led by Director of Bands Jorim E. Reid Sr., D.M.A.

Every year, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses selects the most unique and exceptional marching bands from around the world to participate in the Rose Parade based on various criteria, including musicianship, marching ability, and entertainment or special interest value. It’s estimated that 50 million people worldwide watch the parade, broadcast in more than 170 countries. Approximately 20-25 bands are chosen to perform, with a mix of high school, college, and community bands, and military and international groups included as well.

“The selection of Morgan’s Magnificent Marching Machine to participate in the 137th Rose Parade is a major achievement, not just for our band but for the entire Morgan community. This historic opportunity allows us to showcase the exceptional talent, energy and spirit of our students on an international stage,” said David K. Wilson, president of Morgan State University. “This is an extraordinary moment of pride for Morgan, and I do not doubt that the world will be as captivated by the Magnificent Marching Machine as we are every time they take the field.”

The Rose Parade is one of three “jewels” in what’s considered the “Triple Crown” of parade events: the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Rose Parade, and the U.S. Presidential Inaugural Parade. For Morgan State’s Magnificent Marching Machine, the Rose Parade will be the second of the three “jewels,” as in 2019 they marched in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade — another first for the university. The next presidential inauguration will be held in January 2025.

“There’s no bigger event in the marching band world than the Rose Parade. When you perform on New Year’s Day, the eyes of the world are watching,” said Dr. Reid. “It is an honor for our university to be invited, and a great opportunity for our students and marching band program to be highlighted globally. We look forward to our turn to participate in what’s known as ‘The Granddaddy of Them All.’”

The Rose Parade began in 1890, when Valley Hunt Club members sponsored the first Tournament of Roses. The abundance of flowers in the middle of winter gave them the idea to add a parade of carriages decorated with colorful blooms before the competition. It was also a late 19^th-century bit of friendly west coast-east coast rivalry about the weather.

“In New York, people are buried in snow,” announced Professor Charles F. Holder at a Club meeting. “Here our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let’s hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise.”

Monday marks one year since the Hamas-led attack on Israel, in which Hamas killed more than 1,200 people. Over the past year, Israel has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians.

Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students on Maryland college campuses plan to commemorate the anniversary with a week of protests, vigils, and other events.

University System of Maryland officials in September restricted campus demonstrations on Oct. 7 except for university-sponsored events.

The University of Maryland, College Park barred students from holding their own Oct. 7 demonstrations and University President Darryl Pines encouraged them to “mark the anniversary of Oct. 7 with remembrance and reflection” through university-sponsored events, reported the student-run news publication The Diamondback.

The university’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) were set to host a vigil for Palestinians who have been killed.

The SJP chapter sued the university, Pines, and the University System of Maryland Board of Regents for restricting students’ Oct. 7 events. The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Maryland, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed amicus briefs in support of the lawsuit.

U.S. District Court of Maryland Judge Peter Messitte last week ruled student groups at the university could hold demonstrations on Oct. 7. The decision does not apply to other institutions in the University System of Maryland.

Leading up to Oct. 7, Towson University reiterated its policy for protests and demonstrations.

Johns Hopkins University

The Hopkins Justice Collective plans to hold a silent study-in on Oct. 7 at 1 p.m. at Johns Hopkins University’s Mudd Hall.

The group plans to “publicly stand with Palestine in University spaces, wear keffiyehs and brandish political signage, and non-disruptively congregate in University study spaces,” Hopkins Justice Collective posted on Instagram.

At 2 p.m., the group plans to march to the Blue Jay Statue, followed by a vigil for Palestinian and Lebanese people.

University of Maryland, College Park

On Oct. 7, UMD Hillel will hold a “Hostages Square Memorial” from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; a reading of Oct. 7 victims’ names from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m.; a space for reflection and art from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and a vigil at 8 p.m.

The university’s SJP and JVP chapters will hold speeches, teach-ins, and art events throughout the day Oct. 7. A vigil will take place at 6 p.m.

Those groups will continue events throughout the week, including a screening of the film “Holy Redemption” on Oct. 8; a teach-in led by SJP and USAS Labor and Apartheid on Oct. 9; a screening of the film “5 Broken Cameras” on Oct. 10; and a bake sale for Gaza on Oct. 11.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Starting at 12 p.m. Oct. 7, UMBC’s SJP chapter will gather at Erikson Field to recite the names of people killed in the violence. Then at 6:30 p.m., there will be a group prayer and Dua.

The chapter will continue events throughout the week, including a screening of the film “Where the Olive Trees Weep” on Oct. 8; a bake sale for Gaza on Oct. 9; and chalk writing for Palestine on Oct. 10.

UMBC Hillel will host a commemoration and de-stress event from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Oct. 7.

Towson University

Towson Hillel will hold a commemorative ceremony and mourner’s kaddish at 11 a.m. Oct. 7. Then, from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., they will offer processing space, community service projects, recipes in honor of hostages, and other activities. They will also join an Oct. 7 community commemoration at Beth El Congregation in Pikesville from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

On Oct. 8 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., members of various Towson University student groups plan to hold a rally and vigil at Freedom Square in the center of campus.

Leaders of Johns Hopkins University unveiled preliminary designs on Thursday for the newest addition to their East Baltimore campus, a six-story Life Sciences Building that will provide more than 1,200 lab benches for scientists engaged in biomedical research.

Proposed for a full city block almost directly across the street from Hopkins’ domed Billings administration building, the Life Sciences Building will bring together experts from five different schools in what Hopkins is calling “a collaborative, technology-driven hub for fundamental, basic biomedical science.”

According to The Hub, Hopkins’ in-house publication, the building will contain labs and meeting spaces for Hopkins’ School of Medicine, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Nursing and the Whiting School of Engineering.

“We are thrilled to advance our scientists’ vision of creating research infrastructure designed to speed the pace of discovery and foster interdivisional collaboration across the university,” said Johns Hopkins Medicine CEO and dean of the medical faculty Theodore DeWeese, in a statement. “This state-of-the-art facility will help ensure that Johns Hopkins University continues to set the standard of excellence in medical research.”

Demolition underway

Plans for the new building were presented on Thursday to Baltimore’s Urban Design and Architecture Advisory Panel (UDAAP). The construction site is the southwest corner of East Monument Street and North Broadway, and the building will stretch along Broadway from Monument Street to McElderry Walkway, an east-west pedestrian spine on the medical campus. The next building to the west will be the Armstrong Medical Education Building and the next building to the south will be the Levi Watkins, Jr. M. D. Outpatient Center. Because of the Life Science Building’s location, Hopkins has the ability to connect it to the underground Johns Hopkins station on the Baltimore Metro subway line.

To make way for construction, Hopkins is demolishing three buildings currently on that block: the 10-story Hampton House Building at 624 N. Broadway; 14-story Reed Hall at 600 N. Broadway, and the Denton A. Cooley fitness center at 1620 McElderry St. All faculty members and other staffers have been relocated from Reed Hall and Hampton House, temporary space has been identified to house the research and teaching activities that were there and demolition is well underway, with Berg Corporation as the contractor. The Cooley center is scheduled to close on Oct. 11, and a new space for fitness is scheduled to be operational at the end of October.

According to a Hopkins spokesperson, departments of the Bloomberg School of Public Health (BSPH) that were located in Hampton House will be moving into a school addition that is currently under construction and scheduled to open in the fall of 2026.

Payette, a Boston-based firm with a long track record of designing laboratories and research facilities, is the architect of the Life Sciences Building, and Olin is the landscape architect.

Hopkins’ timetable calls for construction to begin in the summer of 2025 and be complete by the end of 2029. A firm cost estimate has not been released, but the building will be funded through university funds, according to the Hopkins spokesperson.

‘A new ecosystem’

“The Life Sciences Building will create a new ecosystem for foundational, basic biomedical research centered around rapidly developing technologies in areas such as imaging, artificial intelligence, and genetics, which are helping scientists make discoveries at a record-breaking pace,” The Hub reported this week.

With about 500,000 gross square feet of space and six levels of labs and meeting space, the Life Sciences Building “will be a hub for six newly developed ‘scientific neighborhoods’ that connect scientists in similar fields and five ‘technology hubs’ that help scientists maximize the potential of new scientific technologies to advance biomedical research,” The Hub continued. “The neighborhoods and hubs, designed and led by Johns Hopkins scientists, will take shape alongside construction of the building.”

The building is being designed to contain a “flexible mix” of laboratory space, with about 60 percent of the lab space dedicated to experimental approaches and 40 percent of the lab space for scientists focused on computation. Planners say the 1,200 lab benches will provide space for 920 scientists working in biomedical research. The building will also be home for hundreds of graduate students pursuing biomedical research.

According to The Hub, “basic research is at the root of all advances in modern medicine,” from analyzing how molecules interact to drive biology to the development of gene therapies and treatments for human disease.

Recent basic science discoveries at Johns Hopkins include: an analysis of heart tissue sent to space; a search for new biological targets for treating breast cancer; surprise findings from bacteria in freshwater lakes and soil that hint at better antibiotics; a discovery of a molecular pathway disrupted by UV radiation; and using super-chilled brain cells to determine how an epilepsy drug works.

A design departure

In contrast to the historic brick buildings on the east side of Broadway – Marburg, Billings and Wilmer — the Life Sciences Building will have a glass and metal skin, with copper- and bronze-colored walls that curve in certain places to mark entrances and a series of landscaped terraces both on the ground and on upper levels of the building.

The design continues a trend in which Hopkins has been opening up its newer campus buildings to the street rather than walling them off like fortresses. Plans include conference rooms and a glass-walled caféteria on the first floor, overlooking Broadway.

During the UDAAP presentation, panel members reactively positively to the design approach.

“Wow, what a transformative project,” said panel chair Pavlina Ilieva. “I think it’s a really strong, recognizable, cohesive approach to the site. It’s exciting because it is a departure from the other things that are on the campus, from the very historic and traditional buildings to some of the now 30-, 40-year-old buildings and even some of the newer things that we have seen. It’s really great to see that ability to bring something fresh and new, try to integrate it and tie it in some visual ways to at least the color and material language around, but really not hesitate to bring new forms and new types of architecture to the campus, so kudos for that. I think it’s a very strong proposal.”

Ilieva was especially impressed by the way the Life Sciences Building has been designed to open up to the street, just as two other recent campus buildings have been designed to do farther east along the Monument Street corridor.

“It’s really great to see the institution’s commitment tofollow through on that with all of the future projects,” she said. “I think it’s really starting to transform this campus and this whole environment to something completely different and really looking into the future…It’s refreshing to see.”

The extensive amount of landscaping “almost [creates] a park system” that the building nestles into, noted Sharon Bradley, the landscape architect on the review panel. The terraced hillside along Monument Street results in “a biophilic, park-like experience even on a busy street,” she said.

In general, “there are a lot of opportunities [for the researchers] to be outside, in a lot of different ways,” Bradley said, with low walls, planter walls and café tables providing “intentional, definite places for people to pause outside and appreciate the natural setting.”

“I think it’s a wonderful project,” said panel member Osborne Anthony. “There’s a certain amount of care and I would even say exploration that has gone into the design, so I think in that regard it’s successful.”

Anthony said he sees the building’s curving form as a welcome relief to some of the more “orderly and orthodox” institutional buildings on campus.

“I think what’s welcoming about this one is it takes on a kind of an organic framework to it and in many respects, it’s almost like a welcome counterpoint to what’s in the building when you think about it,” he told the design team, led by Payette Senior Associate Wesley Schwartz. “You’re doing research. It’s a life sciences building. There’s a kind of a…rigor that’s associated with that kind of a program. But yet you found the ability to express a little bit more freedom in terms of its massing and…the elegance of the landscaping…It really begins to mediate between the very challenging site, in terms of the grade dropping off…You’ve been able to really work through that in a very crafty and clever manner.”

Johns Hopkins University this year rose to the No. 6 spot in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of the best colleges in the nation.

The Baltimore college climbed from its ninth-place ranking on last year’s list. Hopkins tied with California Institute of Technology, Duke University, and Northwestern University for 6th place this year.

Hopkins was also named 10th on the list of “Best Value Schools.” U.S. News & World Report weighs the school’s academic quality against the cost of attendance for an out-of-state student with average need-based financial aid. While Hopkins tuition is $65,230 – higher than the national average of $45,204 – the cost for the average student receiving need-based aid is $25,630.

Fellow Maryland colleges ranked in the top 10 on some of U.S. News & World Report’s other national lists.

United States Naval Academy placed fourth on the “National Liberal Arts Colleges” list. The academy in Annapolis also tied with the Colorado-based United States Air Force Academy for the sixth-best undergraduate engineering program.

Morgan State University was ranked 10th on the list of “Historically Black Colleges and Universities.”

New program will introduce St. Paul’s students to core topics in business management and entrepreneurship to help prepare future leaders and innovators

The St. Paul’s Schools announced Friday its new Aspiring MBA program in partnership with Loyola University Maryland’s Sellinger School of Business and Management. As part of this program, a select group of St. Paul’s students will attend seminar sessions led by Sellinger School faculty throughout the year, with the first session occurring today.

These workshops will introduce students to topics found in an MBA program, including Leading and Managing People, Marketing Strategy, Corporate Social Responsibility, Emerging Technologies, and more. Students will have the chance to visit Sellinger’s Data Visualization Lab and participate in week-long summer institutes in business or entrepreneurship.

“Renowned scholars and experts in their fields, Sellinger’s faculty members also bring a warmth and student focus that will tremendously benefit the students of St. Paul’s,” said Mary Ann Scully, dean of the Sellinger School. “We look forward to welcoming them to the Sellinger School and introducing them to the basics of business knowledge in the hopes that it will show them how business is a path to a transformational life and transformed communities.”

St. Paul’s School for Girls and St. Paul’s School for Boys invited juniors and seniors with an interest in business and management to apply for this new program. St. Paul’s students regularly cite business as a top career interest, and the program admitted 24 students this first year.  

This opportunity is part of St. Paul’s Experience+ program, which takes learning beyond the core curriculum. Through five distinct areas of excellence—Finance and Entrepreneurship, Career Exploration, Digital Content and Communications, Civic and Global Engagement, and Ethical Leadership—Experience+ enhances learning at all grade levels through real-world experiences.

“At an Episcopal School, our students want to be a force for positive change in the world, and they know that business is a path to innovation, sustainability, and creating real value for society,” says Clark Wight, president of The St. Paul’s Schools. “We are grateful to our partners at Sellinger for helping prepare our students to become the ethical leaders of the future.”

For more information about St. Paul’s Experience+ program, visit  stpaulsmd.org/about/experience or contact Whitney Price, director of strategic initiatives, at wprice@stpaulsmd.org or 410-825-4400 x1139.

The University of Baltimore’s Academic Center would be torn down and replaced with a smaller building under a new Facilities Master Plan that has been created to guide the institution’s growth over the next decade.

In a presentation this month, University of Baltimore President Kurt Schmoke said the plan represents an effort to “right-size” the midtown campus, eliminate outmoded facilities, and create teaching spaces that better suit and align with the way its students will want to learn in the future.

The plan’s chief recommendation is to demolish the 226,387-gross-square-foot Academic Center in the 1400 block of North Charles Street and replace it with a smaller academic structure. The Academic Center is the largest single structure on the University of Baltimore campus — actually three interconnected buildings that together occupy a full city block near Baltimore’s Penn Station.

One of those buildings is a structure once known as The Garage — 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. Among other noteworthy characteristics, it was 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 facilities master plan states that the replacement structure, which administrators are calling a “center for learning,” would provide about 134,000 gross square feet, or about 60 percent as much as the current Academic Center. Planners say that number is a “guesstimate” and that the exact size of the replacement will be determined during a later phase of programmatic planning that will begin after the master plan is approved.

A related recommendation is to convert the former headquarters of a local non-profit organization, The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore at 101 West Mount Royal Avenue, into a “UBalt Welcome Center” housing the President’s Office, admissions, financial aid and other administrative departments now located in the Academic Center. That part of the master plan already is underway, after The Associated announced plans in July to move to Park Heights Avenue and lease its 36,000-square-foot building to the university. The 10-year lease began September 1 and has an option that allows the university to acquire the building and make it a permanent part of campus.

Other recommendations in the master plan include improving the public realm, including streets and plazas, and making interior and exterior changes to seven other structures on its core campus, such as making façade improvements to the H. Mebane Turner Learning Commons and adding athletic facilities on its basement level.

The master plan also notes that a study is underway 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. “By relocating Special Collections and Archives to this stand-alone building in a prominent corner location,” the plan notes, “these special UBalt library resources can be made more public-facing in a way to encourage community access” and increased visibility.

In the works for more than a year, the long-range plan was outlined September 16 in a virtual presentation to the finance committee of the University System of Maryland Board of Regents. The presenters were Schmoke; Maribeth Amyot, Advisor to the President for Strategic Initiatives and chair of the university’s Facilities Master Plan task force, and Barbara Aughenbaugh, Chief Financial Officer and Vice President for Business Affairs. An executive summary and the full 96-page report have been posted on the University of Baltimore’s website.

The master plan “aligns the physical campus more closely with the institution’s mission, vision and values,” the executive summary states. “It addresses key issues and opportunities facing the campus today and looks ahead both toward UBalt’s Centennial in 2025 and towards a 10-year future and beyond.”

UBalt “serves a unique student body that is composed of distinct groups of students who require a more modern campus that better supports multi-modal active learning and operations for nontraditional adult students,” the summary states. “The plan leverages needed redevelopment in the campus core to address deferred maintenance and reimagine the heart of campus…These investments will position the institution to remain The University of Baltimore – and The University for Baltimore – for years to come.”

Three-building complex

At last week’s meeting, Schmoke said the master plan was commissioned to guide physical changes on campus between now and 2034. Ayers Saint Gross is the lead architect working on the master plan; architects for any individual buildings arising from the plan would be selected separately.

The connected buildings that make up the Academic Center include the former automobile showroom, 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 university’s decision to preserve and recycle buildings from the early 1900s to create an academic center resulted in one of the earliest adaptive reuse projects in Baltimore.

The university currently has 3,100 to 3,200 students, down from a high point of around 6,000 students in 2014. Schmoke said enrollment has stabilized since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 – “We’ve stopped the bleeding — and the master plan is designed to accommodate a campus with about 4,000 students, a figure the university is aiming to reach by 2032. Of those 4,000 students, administrators say, they expect that 60 percent will be graduate and professional students, 40 percent will be undergraduates, and 70 percent of the undergraduates will be students who transfer from another institution.

Schmoke and Amyot told the finance committee that the Academic Center contains more space than the university needs at present and that much of the existing space is either obsolete or in need of repairs. Schmoke said the master plan doesn’t call for additional square footage: “We’re actually downsizing.”

Of all the buildings on campus, Schmoke and Amyot said, the Academic Center accounts for 47 percent of the university’s deferred maintenance cases. In addition, they said, its layout can be confusing because the three buildings were designed for different purposes and aren’t fully integrated.

For example, Amyot and Schmoke said, the Academic Center has two elevators that are in separate parts of the block but neither one leads to every part of the building. In addition, the floors in the different buildings don’t line up. Students, employees and visitors say it’s a rabbit warren of spaces and that it can be difficult to find one’s way around once inside. Schmoke joked that the Academic Center was cobbled together by “the same person who designed the camel.”

“The building was not designed as an academic building,” Amyot said. “There’s two elevators. You have to know which elevator to get into because you cannot traverse north to south in the whole building on all floors. You have to go down to the ground floor [and switch elevators.] It’s very confusing for students. The building leaks. It was three buildings that were later connected. It’s just a dysfunctional building and therefore, making the investment to replace it is the way to go. That’s the smart choice.”

Another factor in the planning effort, Schmoke and Amyot said, is that teaching methods have changed in recent years, especially with the popularity of online and hybrid classes, and the teaching spaces in the Academic Center are less than ideal for the way university students want to learn today.

“They don’t have tiered classrooms,” Amyot said. “Chairs don’t have wheels on them. They’re on linoleum floors. Many of the classrooms don’t have windows [because] not all the rooms are on the perimeter. We have low ceiling heights…It’s just not great” as opposed to more modern spaces such as those in the law center.

From a campus planning standpoint, she said, the three-building complex stretches from Mount Royal Avenue to Oliver Street and forms a barrier that makes it difficult to see or get from Charles Street to the west side of campus. “The Academic Center is blocking everything off,” she said. “It’s not a connector.”

Non-traditional campus

Instead of trying to reconfigure the existing structure and introduce new technology, the administrators said, the architects recommended tearing it down and constructing a replacement that aligns more with the university’s mission.

Schmoke told the finance committee that the University of Baltimore is different from other campuses in the University System of Maryland because of the students it serves. He described it as a “commuter institution with a heavy focus on graduate and professional programs.” He noted that its student population is older on average than at other state schools and that many of its students are professionals who are taking classes while also holding a full-time job and raising a family.

Schmoke said 58 percent of UBalt’s students are taking graduate and professional-level courses, 42 percent are undergraduates, and the split is expected to remain at about 60 percent graduates and 40 percent undergraduates into the next decade.

According to the facilities master plan, 46 percent of UBalt students attend part time; 50 percent of the undergraduate students are low-income or first-generation, and 47 percent are members of an “underrepresented minority race.”

The median age of undergraduates at UBalt is 28, as opposed to a university system-wide median age of 22 for undergraduates; 86 percent of UBalt students originate from Maryland, and 30 percent are from Baltimore City. Although it’s not considered one of the state’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), UBalt is Maryland’s only four-year institution designated by the federal government as a “Primarily Black Institution.”

Because they have jobs and family obligations, Schmoke and Amyot said, many of the university’s students prefer to take classes online and in the evening, and many of its classes are scheduled after the traditional work day to suit their schedules.

“These folks that come to school to get their bachelor’s degrees are very different than a traditional undergraduate student,” Amyot said. “In fact, most of our undergraduate students, nearly all of them, come to us as transfers. They don’t come to us out of high school. They either have their associate’s degree or they’ve accumulated credits in some other manner and then they come back later in life because they want to complete that degree. And then together with the undergraduate students being older, we have more graduate students than undergraduate students.” As a result, she said, what students at the University of Baltimore want from the physical campus “differs from what you might see at a lot of other universities.”

The University of Baltimore is focused on what matters to its students, Amyot said.

“In order for our students to attend,” she said, “we need to offer night classes. We need to offer some online classes. We need to offer classes where some students are sitting in the room and some students are remote. Then it works and it’s engaging and folks stick with it.”

There are no residence halls in the master plan because that’s not what UBalt students want, she added.

“Our students don’t want to live in residence halls,” she said. “They already have families. They have jobs. They have living arrangements. And there’s no intercollegiate athletics. Our students are very professionally-oriented.  They’re coming to an accredited degree program really to enhance their career opportunities. They have different needs, and we respond in order for them to be successful. The amenities that they want are not necessarily what a traditional university would offer.”

While UBalt’s business school offers an MBA program that is “completely online,” Schmoke said, many students indicate that they want the option of taking courses either in-person or remotely.

“What we are hearing from our students is that they like the hybrid,” he said. “They like some in-class and then some online. It’s the flexibility that they really like, and that’s what we want to make sure that we can offer. All the classes will have technology that would allow for this.”

Two components

The master plan by Ayers Saint Gross shows the existing Academic Center replaced by a new structure that’s divided into two components. Renderings in the master plan show one section rising five or six stories and one section rising six or seven stories, and they’re connected by a three-level link that doesn’t come down to the ground.

At a potential height of seven stories, the profile would be “more comparable to the adjacent 12-story Angelos Law Center than the previous academic center,” the master plan states. “A two-level roof profile with lower roof to the south can create opportunities for both green roof/event space and onsite power generation through solar panels.”

Renderings in the master plan show that the two sections of the building would be separated at ground level by a pedestrian pathway that runs through the block diagonally. The pathway would lead from Penn Station at 1515 North Charles Street to the new Welcome Center on Mount Royal Avenue. This configuration, along with removal of the existing Academic Center, gives the university an opportunity to enlarge and reimagine Gordon Plaza, the large open space at the northeast corner of Mount Royal and Maryland avenues, where UBalt’s Edgar Allan Poe statue is.

Schmoke and Amyot said development of the master plan has been informed by a community engagement process that has included meetings with stakeholders from both within and outside the university. In addition to representatives of various academic and administrative departments, they said, community groups that have been involved in the planning process include the Bolton Hill Community Association, the Mount Vernon Belvedere Association, the Central Baltimore Partnership and the Midtown Community Benefits District.

According to its authors, the master plan was developed around five principles. They are to:

“Foster a sense of place that reinforces the identity of UBalt as an anchor institution of and for Baltimore.”

“Create a vibrant and inclusive campus that matches the unique needs and priorities of [UBalt’s] non-traditional professional and career-focused student body.”

“Ensure learning environments are flexible and adaptable to meet the evolving needs and priorities of our students and community.”

“Realign and renew existing space to reduce deferred maintenance and prioritize student recruitment, retention, growth and success.”

“Strengthen the pedestrian experience through safe streets and active first-floor experiences.”

The September 16 presentation to the finance committee was the first step in a review process that’s intended to culminate with adoption of the facilities master plan by the full Board of Regents. Once the master plan is adopted, the university will begin another round of planning to determine exactly what programs will be housed in the new center for learning and how much space it will contain. This detailed round of programmatic planning will help architects and planners come up with a final design, for which the university will seek funding.

Creation of the 36,000-square-foot Welcome Center on Mount Royal Avenue affects long-range planning as well, administrators say, because the relocation of any departments there potentially means less space needed in the building that replaces the Academic Center.

The finance committee took no action on the master plan after the initial presentation.  In keeping with the Regents’ standard practice, members of the finance committee will vote at their October 30 meeting on whether to recommend the master plan to the full Board of Regents for approval. If it does, the full board will then consider UBalt’s master plan at its November 22 meeting.

Architectural history

The three-story building at the northwest corner of Charles Street and Mount Royal Avenue was the third location of the Mar-Del Mobile Company, an early car dealership that built it for “the sale and storage of automobiles,” according to a 1905 article in The Sun. Previous locations were 101 North Charles Street and 617-619 W. Pratt Street.

At various times, the Mar-Del Mobile Company sold Packards, Franklins, Waverly Electrics, Searchmonts and other types of automobiles. It was the first dealer in Baltimore to sell Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles and Dodges. It initially sold Cadillacs when it opened on Mount Royal Avenue, stopped selling them in 1909, and then began selling them again in 1922 when it merged with the Baltimore Cadillac Company. Its move to the corner of Charles Street and Mount Royal Avenue has been credited with helping to transform that area into an automotive business district with other dealerships operating nearby.

Compared to other car dealerships in the area, Mar-Del’s building was unusually large because the company made it a sort of department store for cars, a multi-purpose emporium that contained sales showrooms, car service bays, meeting rooms for the Maryland Automobile Club and other spaces for car owners and their families to spend time while their cars were being repaired.

Known as The Garage, with 90,000 square feet of space, the building “was once the hub of Baltimore’s early car culture,” according to a plaque in the building’s lobby. “Here, while clients waited for their cars to be serviced, they amused themselves in ‘the most up-to-date place of amusement for ladies and gentlemen in the world.’ In addition to the car showrooms, the building boasted billiard rooms, 36 bowling alleys, a skating rink, women’s gymnasium and restaurant. A few special occasions at ‘The Garage’ reportedly drew as many as 20,000 people a day.”

The building was designed by Clyde Nelson Friz, who also designed the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s central building on Cathedral Street; the Standard Oil Building on St. Paul Street, UBalt’s Liberal Arts and Policy Building and, with John Russell Pope, the Scottish Rite Temple on North Charles Street. The Garage’s “wide overhanging roof and strong horizontal lines showed similarities to the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright,” the plaque notes.

Instead of echoing the Beaux Arts Classical style buildings on Mount Vernon Place, Friz took a daring departure from the more conventional styles of the 19th century for the new building type serving the invention that would largely define the next century, the automobile.

Eschewing classical ornamentation, Friz worked with what is now called the Eclectic style of early 20th century architecture to design a building that combined elements of the Mediterranean Revival style with the popular Prairie style that was emerging at the start of the 20th century from Wright’s studio in Oak Park, Illinois.

“The Midwestern style is most apparent in The Garage’s planar brick facade articulated with deeply set windows, the shorter third-story windows set within the shadow line of the projecting hipped roof, and the excessive masonry corbeling at the first floor openings,” observed architectural historian James Russiello. ” To support the weight of cars and equipment for this modern building, Friz for once hid the modernity of his structure’s reinforced concrete under a cladding of brick.”

Centered above the second-floor windows on the two primary facades were large white letters that spelled out “The Garage.” Early photos show a wide sidewalk along Mount Royal Avenue with cars spilling out of the building.

“While the Mar-Del Company’s new home is no ‘Castle in Spain,’ there is a decided suggestion of Spanish architecture in its appearance and proportions,” observed a 1910 article in The Packard, which called the company’s headquarters “unique and handsome” and pointed to the six-foot-wide balcony that “projects from the second floor along the two main fronts of the building.” The article’s headline was “Bully for Baltimore.”

Windows for gawking

Before the introduction of the Ford Model T in 1908 as the first mass-affordable automobile, car ownership was an elite luxury that drew the curious and status seekers. Early auto showrooms were decorated in a variety of styles throughout the East Coast, with an emphasis on large display windows to facilitate gawking by pedestrains on the sidewalk peering deep into the showroom.

“Many of these outfits in the early 20th century were older businesses rehabbing their look as they cautiously adapted in the transitional period between horse-powered vehicles and vehicles with horsepower,” Russiello noted. “As such, new buildings for clubhouse-like businesses offering an array of services are especially distinct.”

Due to their connection to luxury products, Russiello said, auto showrooms were often designed by notable architects, “even as late as the 1954 Hoffman Auto Showroom in Manhattan by Frank Lloyd Wright, which was demolished in 2013 but considered a prototype for his Guggenheim Museum.” In 2014, he said, The Audrain Auto Museum of Newport, Rhode Island, relocated into a restored auto showroom designed by the noted architect Bruce Price, who was born in Maryland, and built in 1902-1903 for Adolph Audrain.

The University of Baltimore acquired the building in 1968 and worked with Allen C. Hopkins of Fisher, Nes, Campbell and Partners to convert it for academic use. “The renovation which produced the new academic and administrative complex was completed in 1971 and earned the architects an award from Baltimore Heritage Inc.,” the plaque notes.

Although the interior was modified extensively and administrators have problems with the way the building has been joined with the structures to the north, the exterior has retained many of its original elements, including the solid-to-void ratio of the window and door openings; the Flemish bonded textured brickwork of varied brown hues with deeply raked mortar; brick piers at the base supported on masonry plinths that blended with the sidewalk; the third-floor sillcourse supporting brick-engaged columns between windows, and the projecting hipped roof.

CHAP review

UBalt’s three-building Academic Center complex falls within the boundaries of the city’s Mount Vernon Historic District, where the city’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP) typically has authority to review and approve proposed changes to building exteriors, up to and including demolition.

According to CHAP executive director Eric Holcomb, CHAP does not have legal authority to review changes to state-owned buildings in a Baltimore City historic district. Holcomb said CHAP does ask state agencies to present their plans to the commission for review but that doesn’t necessarily prevent demolition.

He pointed to the university’s plans more than a decade ago to replace a structure called the Odorite Building at the southeast corner of Mount Royal and Maryland avenues with a new student center. In that case, some local preservationists argued that the Odorite Building was architecturally significant and should be preserved, but university leaders at the time opted to replace it with a new structure.

If a building is owned by the University of Baltimore, which is a state agency, “they legally don’t have to go through the CHAP process (that’s how we lost the Odorite building),” Holcomb said in an email message. “But we always ask state agencies to comply with city regulations (permits, CHAP review etc.). In most cases they honor that request.”

Asked before the finance committee meeting if university planners had considered preserving any part of the current Academic Center, Schmoke said they did but concluded it would not be as cost effective or space-efficient as building a new structure that’s designed to meet the university’s current needs and the latest standards for environmental sustainability.

“Because next year’s our Centennial, we’ve been looking at what the University of Baltimore is going to look like in the next 100 years, and we know we have to make adjustments to the way people learn now, which is a combination of online and in class,” he said. “We have more physical facilities than we really need for the way higher education is delivered in the future, so we are going to tear this down” and “redesign something that is smaller but also consistent with environmental regulations, the way the law school is…We want all of our buildings to be environmentally-sustainable and meet not only today’s but tomorrow’s environmental rules.”

In addition, he said, “we’re trying to figure out how we can knit the campus more with the rest of the development in the community.”

Use by Baltimore City College

Before the Academic Center is demolished, it will serve as a temporary home for Baltimore City College, a public high school with about 1,500 students. Baltimore’s Board of School Commissioners voted 8 to 1 in May to accept an offer from Schmoke, a City College graduate, to have the university house students, teachers and other staffers on its midtown campus while City College’s historic building at 3220 The Alameda undergoes renovation.

The university’s plan calls for City College to relocate to the University of Baltimore campus from August 2025 to August 2028. The Academic Center is one of two major campus buildings that City College would temporarily occupy, along with portions of the William H. Thumel Sr. Business Center. Once the City College renovations are complete in 2028, the high school students and teachers will move back to The Alameda and the university will be able to move ahead with its long-range campus plan.

Although demolition of the Academic Center can’t start before late 2028 because of the lease agreement with the city school board, university leaders say, they can use that time to finalize plans for the replacement project and line up funding. They say the target date for completion of a new campus building and plaza is sometime in the early 2030s.

September 23 was 100 days from the start of 2025, the 100th anniversary of the year UBalt was founded. Schmoke told the finance committee members that the university plans to mark the institution’s 100th anniversary in 2025 with a yearlong celebration that includes events in January, the spring of 2025, and the fall of 2025, looking at its past, present and future. He said the master plan also includes recommendations for adding new signs and graphics around campus that will underscore the university’s presence in the city.

No ’time-out sign’

Schmoke, 74, served as Mayor of Baltimore from 1987 to 1999 and has been president of the University of Baltimore since July of 2014. He said he has no plans to retire and is enthusiastic about realizing a new vision for the university and its campus.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said. “So far my wife hasn’t given me the time-out sign…It’s been a real team effort. I’d like to particularly get through the Centennial and then we’ll see what happens after that.”

The master plan is intended to complement other major development initiatives for midtown, including upgrades to Penn Station and a mixed-use development on Maryland Avenue at Oliver Street, Schmoke added.

“I think it is an outstanding investment for Baltimore, because we’re right in the center of the city,” he said. “It’s coming at the right time.”