Before he set off on what he calls the biggest creative challenge of his life – the design of the glass face of the Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center – New York-based installation artist Spencer Finch asked Johns Hopkins staff what they’d like to see when the new building is unveiled in 2011. The response? Something different each day!

Hmmm. How do you make a static and singular 12-story structure ever-changing with each 24-hour passing of the sun and stars? Right away, Finch began to conceive an answer. But rather than look at the steel frame being erected at the corner of Wolfe and Orleans Streets in East Baltimore, Finch looked at the air around it. Then, collaborating with a group of architects from Hopkins and Perkins+Will, the Chicago-based architectural firm charged with designing the pediatric and adult towers, he started thinking water.

“From the beginning we were thinking about glass as an analogue for water, how glass and water behave in similar ways, and what we could do with the glass so that it’s always changing,” says Finch. “Also, it’s a big building and it can be intimidating, but water has a certain softness and welcoming aspect to it.”

The idea was a natural one for Finch, who has spent much of his career submerged in the mystery of natural elements like light, wind and water. As an installation artist – an artist who takes on large scale, thought-provoking pieces of art – Finch has attempted to capture the quality of light at various places at various times – from Arizona’s Painted Desert at night to Paris at dusk – and to re-create it through, among other devices, fluorescent lights, colored filters and solar panels.

Now, at the request of art curator Nancy Rosen, representing the Bloomberg family, Finch was being asked to enter the world of architecture and give a new face to a new children’s hospital and its neighboring adult tower – a project unlike any he had tackled before.

“I’m used to putting up an exhibition in a gallery or a museum for a month or two, and then it’s down, but this is something really permanent,” says Finch. “Initially it was terrifying, and it still is.”

Finch’s fears were allayed by the team he was invited to join – Rosen, architect and Hopkins Facilities Director Michael Iati, consulting architect Allen Kolkowitz, and architect Ed Witkowski of Perkins+Will. The group met with Finch at his Brooklyn studio, gave him an immersion class in the tectonics of glass, and together toured buildings in New York designed with frits – patterns on glass – to stimulate their own thinking.

The collaboration led to the concept of glass as water and the idea of using two panes of fritted glass for each 6 x 7-foot colored panel. Finch chose 44 colors from Claude Monet’s Water Lily paintings – colors often seen in nature – and then, after observing the panels in the Baltimore light on the roof of the Orleans Street Garage across from the new hospital site, narrowed the list down to 26 colors.

Rather than using computer-generated geometric frits, Finch selected handmade paintbrush strokes that would be etched on one layer of glass and sandblasted on the other, adding depth and enhancing the interplay between the glass – or water – and the light. The adult and children’s towers are unified by these frits, notes Iati, but individualized by the panel color choices – predominant greens for the adult tower and blues for the children’s – much like two different areas of the same pond.

“Think of sitting in a meadow next to a pond, looking into the water and seeing the colors from the sky, the clouds, the sun, the plants and flowers around the pond,” says Iati.

“The frits will give the impression of gentle movement,” adds Rosen, “like sunlight glistening on water.”

What patients, families and staff may feel will be left to their interpretation, but members of the team envision a calming yet energetic environment, one well-suited for advancing pediatric medicine.

“There’s a certain amount of complexity in the design,” says Finch, “and a feeling of activity and aliveness that reflects all the great stuff that happens here.”

When completed, adds Iati, the new complex may be as transforming as nature itself: “It’s very possible the buildings will never look the same anytime you look at them. They will always be changing with the light.