While the new clinical buildings at Johns Hopkins are large in scale, observers note that their design makes them surprisingly approachable. But what will patients, families, visitors and staff sense when they actually enter The Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center and the Sheikh Zayed Tower this spring? What will the interior design say to them? What will they see and what will they feel?

To get at the answers the designers of the facility take us on a virtual tour of sorts, starting with the blue sky bridge connecting the Orleans Street Garage with the Bloomberg Children’s Center. Crossing the bridge we’re drawn to the expansive entry plaza below to our left, its linear front gardens organized by brick borders, stone work and plantings. Then we catch this childlike rhino just outside the Bloomberg Children’s Center ground entrance, curiously peering up through the canopy connecting the children’s and adult towers. Lightheartedly looking back we see this small rhino is climbing the back of a larger rhino. We’re curious, too.

Next our tour guides point to a point of reception at the end of the bridge, a solid-white desk deeply layered and sealed with an acrylic polyester blend with a marble-like characteristic. “It just makes you wonder what it is, but you’ll also have a sense that it can take a beating,” says Johns Hopkins architect Michael Iati.

We take an easy breath as we approach it because there are no walls of security guards hovering or lining our entry. Gone are the gauntlets. Receptionists and security personnel, Iati says, can do their job without forming portals for patients and visitors: “A lot of the geometry and arrangement of the buildings allows security officers to be able to take the temperature of a situation and decide if they need to move closer.”

Moving past the desk we move into the Bloomberg Children’s Center and suddenly feel some surprising sensations as we gaze up the four-story glass atrium at an outsized ostrich dangling from the ceiling, a cow jumping over a necklace of 28 moons and a family of puffer fish playing in an imaginary pool. Taking in this magical collage floating in air we feel mesmerized and almost forget why we’re here.

“It is a playful response,” says consulting architect Allen Kolkowitz. “Simply put, it’s an attempt to make the hospital experience friendly and unintimidating.”

But not in a frivolous way, adds art curator Nancy Rosen: “Visually the aesthetics are fresh, unique and thoughtful. They don’t fall back on simple clichés.”

As we move along the 2nd floor concourse toward the Zayed Tower atrium, the adult lobby sweeps up and welcomes us with a flood of ambient light, limestone and Grecian white marble walls, terrazzo floors, elliptical oases and reflecting pools, a bordering meditation garden that seems to spawn growth in the air of the lobby itself. Architecturally positioned plantings, pottery and other pieces of art imbue nature’s life forces.

“You feel this elegance and simplicity in the space, this activity and embrace of nature,” Kolkowitz says. “The exterior integrates with the interior and you can’t help but feel part of the natural world.”

But there’s something more, Kolkowitz adds – malleability and meditation in the curves and subtle recesses of the lobby, reflections of knowledge and wisdom in the walls, what he calls “the authenticity of the institution.” Already the environment is evocative – its elements forming meanings like healing and hope, stability and strength, support and trust.

“The lobby sends a visual invitation that you receive in a very contemplative manner,” says Kolkowitz. “You feel yourself forming a relationship that is very personal and spiritual.”

Still on the second floor loop – the new buildings’ main street that links from the lobby to amenities, clinical services and other buildings on campus – we pass the food court, gift and flower shops, the nondenominational chapel, and the pharmacy. This loop, say the designers, is where the functionality of the new clinical buildings’ design really kicks in, where light and color, as much as signage, get us to where we’re going. The way-finding palettes of the exterior – blue for the children’s side and green for the adult’s – flow into the interior flooring, elevators and elevator lobbies, family lounges and patient units. We step off an elevator to a unit and we’re welcomed by light and exterior views of the city, the harbor and the campus, and what we see outside orients us to where we are inside.

“It’s a natural lit experience in which you’re always visually reconnecting,” says Kolkowitz.

“It’s a unique visual experience,” adds Iati, “that anchors you when you come back.”

And even if we don’t have to, in ways we feel like we want to.
 

This is one in a series of articles on the architecture, art and design of the new clinical buildings – The Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center and the Sheikh Zayed Tower – that will appear in Johns Hopkins publications and websites this fall and next winter and spring. The new buildings open May 1, 2012. Next in the series, The Art of Johns Hopkins Medicine.