Making Up for Lost Time

The Maryland Institute College of Art had almost 100 years to contemplate construction of a new building. The school’s Baltimore campus, in the historic Bolton Hill neighborhood, had no real focus and consisted of an eclectic mix of existing structures reused as classroom buildings. The school’s previous new construction project was in 1907 when the "Palace," the white marble, Renaissance Revival main building, was completed after the college’s original facility was destroyed in the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904.

The milky white sculptural glass curtainwall both conceals and reveals the center’s building-within-a-building construction.

So, figuratively and literally, the new Brown Center was a century in the making. The college clearly made up for lost time; one look at the modern, sculptural building that houses the school’s digital arts and design programs and it’s obvious this is a 21st century facility. The angular, glass structure, which at first seems to dramatically standout, almost as quickly blends into its site, an oddly shaped former parking lot. The center seems to grow out of the site rather than appear built on it.

"It’s a difficult and very tight site, the shape of a parallelogram," says architect Charles Brickbauer, working with the firm Ziger/Snead LLP. "There were many problems with the site – with the geometry of it."

The site is surrounded by all means of obstacles, including railroad tracks, a sunken highway, a bridge, and city streets. The streets intersect at a 62-degree angle, and that angle became the building’s dominant theme.

"All the angles in the building somehow consequently derive from that number [62]. All the geometries in the building come from that," says Brickbauer.

The 62-degree angle theme makes the building seem so at ease in its location because the site is treated as just another plane in the building’s composite.

Design

The college had no preconceived notions about what the center would look like, they simply asked for something really special, Brickbauer says. The school’s other requests were fairly straightforward. They wanted flexible loft spaces – 20 feet wide – so that as programs developed the learning spaces could evolve. They wanted a state-of-the-art auditorium that seated 550 people. They wanted office space. They wanted a campus focus.

Multiple angles making up the front atrium entrance all derive from the number 62 -as do all the building’s geometries.

Constructed, equipped, and furnished for $20 million, the 61,410-square-foot Brown Center, sheathed in glass with a white frit pattern, is now the college’s central point. A landscaped plaza and large green lead up to the center’s 60-foot-high atrium entrance. Across the street is the school’s second most recent new construction project, the 97-year-old Palace.

"It’s a 21st century building across from an early 20th century building," Brickbauer says of the Brown Center facing the Palace. "There’s definitely a conversation going on between the two buildings on each side of the street, which was part of the idea."

One might assume that conversation would be about what lies within the sculptural glass curtainwall. The complex glazing surrounds an inner structure that houses the educational spaces, essentially creating a building within a building.

"The layout of the building inside worked out very well," says Brickbauer. The auditorium was placed on the lower level and classrooms occupy the four floors above it. "When we started the design it wasn’t fully decided how it would be broken up inside so we gave them as much flexibility as possible," he says.

"There are peripheral corridors going all the way around every floor and there are areas that are more specifically galleries – they are wider spaces and look down into the atrium," Brickbauer says. "With the corridors surrounding the entire building, it becomes one huge gallery, the entire building."

Although made up of 1,285 individual glass pieces, these many separate pieces look like large glass sheets interrupted only with caulk joints, which are imperceptible at a distance.

The building is also a highly visible gallery. "It has a very high profile. Much more so than I expected. It’s amazing," says Brickbauer. "You can see it while taking the train through town. You can see it from some highways. There are a lot of surprise views of it."

And the school loves the building’s high visibility. "When they saw the design, they loved it," says Brickbauer. "I was very convinced of the design as it developed and I ran it past the [institute’s president] during the design process and got his approval for the direction I was going. It materialized at the most amazing speed. It’s one of the fastest projects I’ve ever done."

Around the same time the design was revealed, a board member, Eddie Brown, stepped in with a $6 million donation ($5 million toward construction and $1 million as a challenge grant creating an endowment for operating costs) and the building was named the Brown Center in honor of Eddie and his wife Sylvia Brown. The donation is the largest single gift ever received by the college and one of the largest gifts from an African-American family in the nation’s history, according to the college’s Web site.

While the project is one of the fastest Brickbauer has worked on, it’s also one of his most complicated. He praises the work of construction manager Whiting-Turner and specialty glazing contractor Harmon Inc.

"They did the detailing, how it was actually going to fit together. And it fit together, that’s what’s so amazing. They started on one side of the building and when they came all the way around it came together perfectly."

"We worked day and night with Harmon getting the thing worked out," Brickbauer adds. "They made a very interesting comment when we sat down with them the first day. They said, ‘Well, we’ve done all this before, but never all in the same building.’"

Construction

"The project was certainly a challenge and very exciting to be involved in," says Whiting-Turner Vice President Bill Whiting. "Some of the challenges were the tight site, the close proximity to the railroad tracks, and the occupied building next to Brown Center. The concrete structure was also a challenge. The tolerances were very rigid because of the special design of the curtain wall system."

That complicated curtain wall system consisted of enough laminated glass lites – called four-sided structural glazing – to cover 40,000 square feet. There are a total of 1,285 glass lites and 350 pieces of pattern glass, which is any piece that’s not rectangular.

"You can imagine how many pieces of glass were triangles or trapezoids, or rectangles with a corner cut off," says Ken Leitch, project manager for Harmon. "There were very few pieces of glass that were like the next piece of glass. A lot of custom work was involved."

The glazing’s milky white appearance was achieved by inserting a ceramic frit with a perforated hole pattern into the airspace between two pieces of 1/4-inch-thick glass. Once installed, these many separate pieces look like large glass sheets interrupted only with caulk joints, which are imperceptible at a distance.

"The chore was getting everything right since so much of it was prefabricated, and then getting it to go together once it all arrived at the job site," says Leitch.

Getting everything right meant dealing with an unusual steel pipe framed skeleton that supported the atrium’s curtainwall.

"Typically, structural steel has sloppier tolerances than what we’re used to dealing with," says Leitch, "so the contractor thought this was going to be a major problem trying to coordinate the structural steel with the curtainwall. They put the structural steel in our contract because they said they wanted one central responsibility for the whole thing."

In order to create as precise a structural steel skeleton as possible, Harmon had their engineering manager, Joe Digiacinto, put the project into a 3-D CAD program.

"You can rotate views and look into the skeletal framework and zero in on some of the difficult anchoring connections and see what’s actually happening there," says Leitch. "The coordination problem between the structural steel skeleton and the curtainwall was getting all the anchorage to line up because this framework was about 60 to 70 percent factory assembled."

While the framework was being produced by Greiner Industries in central Pennsylvania in coordination with Whiting-Turner, the glazing was being produced in Harmon’s Baltimore facility, a process that lasted about six months. The glass weighs about 10 pounds per square foot, with some pieces measuring 5 feet wide by 15 feet high and weighing 750 pounds. Leitch says the average piece weighed about 375 pounds. Glass production was further complicated by the fact that the pieces had to be produced in the exact sequence they were going to be installed on the building and then staged on the trucks in that exact order.

Getting the finished steel skeleton assemblies to the site also required delicate maneuvering through downtown Baltimore. "Some of the units that were manufactured by Greiner were as much as 85 feet long, which is way beyond what you’re supposed to carry on a truck," Leitch says. "We had to get special hauling permits to bring these in in the middle of the night. We even shut down the road in one direction so we could drive up the wrong way to get to the job site so everything would be there in the morning, ready for erection."

The glass was glued to the frames using structural silicone on all four sides – a process that differs from most structural silicone installations that require application to only two sides. "This was a little more difficult but it’s what gives the building its aesthetic," Leitch says. "The process went very smoothly. I’d be lying if I told you it all went perfect, it didn’t," Leitch explains.

The challenge was working on some of the building’s more remarkable angles, including one part of the building that angles out over a sidewalk at a 26-degree angle. "We picked up the glass with power cups and would swing it onto the building with a crane, but the difficulty was with the way the walls leaned in or leaned out," says Leitch. "When you’re swinging it into the building, well, the top of the building gets in the way when you’re trying to put the glass on the lower floors. We had to pull it in with cables – there was a lot of individual manhandling." Installation took about six months to complete. Construction of the entire building took about two years.

Completion

The Brown Center’s dedication ceremony on October 17, 2003, marked the opening of a facility already being referred to as a major Baltimore landmark. With accolades coming from architecture critics writing for The Washington Post and The New York Times, it seems that after a hiatus of nearly 100 years, the college didn’t just pick up where it left off with new campus construction, it instead leapfrogged well into the future.