Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center

The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center is a 435,000-square-foot building that underwent a major structural renovation and redesign to serve as the primary Washington, DC location for the university. It supports the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, as well as other graduate programs including portions of the Carey Business School and Advanced Academic Programs and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The facility includes 420,000 square feet of academic, meeting, and gathering space, including 38 high-tech classrooms, a 375-seat theatre, numerous areas of group and individual study space, lounges, conference space, media suites, and several roof terraces with views of the US Capitol.

A Complex Interior to Accommodate Diverse Programs

Originally designed to accommodate a highly specialized and linear museum exhibit experience, the structure’s transformation to an academic building required building spaces that could adapt to multiple university programs and emerging pedagogies.

Clark gutted and repurposed the building’s interior, removed the Newseum's First Amendment façade, replaced the south and east façades of the existing structure, and reconfigured floorplates to increase the building’s functional square footage. The revitalization introduced more natural sunlight in the building’s façade, reconfigured floor plates to increase square footage, and modified building systems to support the university’s academic efforts, sustainability goals, and accessibility. 

The structural renovation included removing over half of four large floors between levels one through six, then rebuilding structural floors at a more appropriate cadence for the new building’s program. The structural revisions also included rotating the sheer core of the building by 90 degrees to support a configuration for the six-bank elevators that worked more efficiently with the new building’s floor programming. The project team completed all structural renovations without crane access due to existing surrounding structures.  

A "floating" cantilevered classroom above a pedestrian bridge was constructed as a distinctive element in the atrium, extending across its length. A new monumental stair vertically unites the atrium with the remaining parts of the building. In addition, a terraced amphitheater in the atrium serves as a gathering space to socialize and host discussions or performances. 

A Welcoming Exterior

The new design's exterior invites the community with an entry level that is visible and open to the street and reinterprets the façade and interiors to align with Johns Hopkins' institutional mission. During seven visits to the stone quarry, the team hand-selected and dry-laid more than one million pounds of Tennessee pink marble to ensure the exterior harmonized with the National Gallery of Art across the street.

To account for the weight of the new façade, installation of the limestone and curtainwall systems required “pre-loading” several of the floors with 95 totes filled with over 26,000 gallons of water for a distributed load totaling over 215,000 pounds, which simulated the weight of the applied building envelope. The construction team removed preload components as they installed equal portions of the envelope. 

Building on an Accelerated Construction Timeline

Construction was completed on time under an aggressive three-year schedule, with a peak workforce of 700 team members per day on site to deliver the project for the beginning of the fall 2023 semester. The project team constructed new permanent structural elements early to minimize the temporary structural support required to enable the bulk of the selective structural demolition and rebuild. Clark utilized four-dimensional scheduling in reverse to plan the work, using the building model to deconstruct existing elements and build new ones as a visualization tool while simultaneously using the software to generate the schedule.