Demolition is underway on one of many few East Coast buildings designed by the late Anthony Lumsden, a colleague of Cesar Pelli and former member of the “LA 12,” a bunch of California-based modernist architects. Contractors are taking down the Bard Constructing, a five-story construction that Lumsden designed for Baltimore Metropolis Neighborhood Faculty when he was director of design for Daniel, Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall (DMJM).
Named after the school’s founder and first president, Harry Bard, the 172,642-square-foot Bard Constructing at Lombard Avenue and Market Place was designed to include lecture rooms, a library, a vogue design studio, scholar lounge, and school places of work.
It opened in 1976 as a part of a two-building satellite tv for pc campus for the group faculty, whose principal campus is on Liberty Heights Avenue in West Baltimore. A smaller companion construction additionally designed by Lumsden, the two-story William V. Lockwood Constructing, opened the identical yr as a part of an effort by the school to determine a presence close to town’s rejuvenated Internal Harbor and downtown workforce.
In recent times, the school has concentrated its applications in West Baltimore, permitting the Lockwood property to be cleared and redeveloped within the Nineties and shuttering the Bard Constructing in 2009. Fenced off and in poor situation, the one-time image of the school’s progress got here to be seen as an eyesore at a busy intersection one block from the waterfront.
The faculty, which owns the 1.1-acre website, has explored the concept of sustaining a downtown presence, probably by constructing a mixed-use construction there in partnership with a non-public developer, however a alternative challenge has not materialized.
Final summer season, Maryland Governor Wes Moore and different members of the state’s Board of Public Works granted a request to spend $4.2 million for the Bard Constructing to be razed. The state’s plan is for the constructing to get replaced quickly with a “inexperienced house” to provide campus leaders time to provide you with a plan to information future redevelopment of the property.
State officers say the school has begun a group outreach effort as a part of a long-range planning course of and that demolishing the constructing now will remove an eyesore and potential security hazard, whereas making it simpler for eventual redevelopment later.
Within the 14 years because the faculty ceased operations there, “this constructing has fallen into vital disrepair,” Moore mentioned through the state Board of Public Works assembly at which demolition funds had been accredited. “So right now this board is taking a vital step to have the ability to lastly demolish the vacant constructing” and work with faculty leaders to consider “the way forward for that website and what it’s going to imply not only for [the college] but in addition what it’s going to imply for Baltimore as a complete.”
Due to its deteriorated situation, “it’s very clear that the constructing must be demolished,” faculty president Debra McCurdy mentioned on the assembly. “We simply can’t be extra thrilled to maneuver ahead after which to start to introduce to this group…the bigger imaginative and prescient of what might occur within the outdated Bard website.”
Large-name Architects
Baltimore Metropolis Neighborhood Faculty employed Lumsden and DMJM at a time when public officers and personal builders had been searching for big-name architects from out-of-town to design buildings round Baltimore’s revitalized waterfront.
One in all Baltimore’s former housing commissioners was an structure aficionado who stored a want record of distinguished architects he’d wish to see design buildings for town’s skyline, and he landed a lot of them. Others enlisted to design buildings in downtown Baltimore included Henry Cobb for the World Commerce Heart Baltimore, Edward Durell Stone for the Maryland Science Heart, and Benjamin Thompson & Associates for the Harborplace pavilions.
Different starchitects who designed main tasks for downtown Baltimore that had been by no means realized embody Kenzo Tange, Louis Kahn, Richard Rogers, Philip Johnson, Kevin Roche, and Michael Graves.
DMJM was reorganized in 2000, and its structure places of work turned a part of the AECOM design community. Lumsden left DMJM in 1993 and opened his personal observe, Anthony J. Lumsden Associates. He died of pancreatic most cancers in 2011 on the age of 83. The Bard and Lockwood buildings had been his solely two buildings in Baltimore, aside from the subway system.
A variety of Lumsden’s tasks remained unbuilt, together with his 1973 design for a Beverly Hills resort, which might have included a collection of cylindrical visitor room wings extending from a central tower, all mirrored in glass. Others had been later used as units or backdrops for movies and tv exhibits, together with his Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, which doubled as house of the Starfleet Academy within the movement image collection Star Trek: The Subsequent Era. In 1976, Lumsden was named one of many “LA 12,” a bunch of distinguished architects based mostly in California, together with Pelli; Frank Gehry; John Lautner; Craig Elwood and others.
Tiles Falling Off
The Bard Constructing wasn’t as effectively acquired as a few of the different buildings taking form across the harbor. One adjective continuously used to explain it was “hulking.” Phoebe Stanton, the structure critic for The Baltimore Solar when it opened, gave it a scathing overview.
One criticism of the Bard Constructing was that its principal entrance was darkish and foreboding, with a steep flight of stairs that posed a barrier to individuals in wheelchairs. The outside was clad in crimson ceramic tiles that had not been used earlier than regionally. They had been Lumsden’s response to the normal crimson brick used on close by buildings such because the Candler Constructing and the Wholesale Fish Market, now the Port Discovery youngsters’s museum.
The constructing’s exterior didn’t climate effectively. Whereas its ceramic tiles could have been appropriate for the local weather of Southern California, in Baltimore they started cracking and falling off the facet of the constructing, inflicting leaks inside. Engineers introduced in to evaluate the scenario mentioned Lumsden and his associates didn’t take note of the freeze-thaw cycles widespread with East Coast winters.
The tiles expanded and contracted at a distinct price than the concrete construction to which they had been hooked up, and that brought about them to interrupt off. At one level campus planners reskinned the highest flooring with a champagne-colored materials that gave the constructing a two-tone look, as if it had been sporting a helmet.
The destiny of the Bard Constructing matches that of different modernist buildings torn down in Baltimore over the previous decade, amongst these the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre by John Johansen, demolished to make approach for a high-rise residence challenge that by no means materialized; the McKeldin Fountain, a Brutalist sculpture and fountain by Thomas Todd of Wallace Roberts & Todd, changed with a plaza; and the Mattin Heart, an arts heart on the Johns Hopkins College’s Homewood campus by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. Mattin Heart might be changed by a scholar heart designed by BIG, Shepley Bulfinch, Rockwell Group, and others.
Final fall, the event staff that controls the Harborplace pavilions disclosed plans to tear them all the way down to make approach for a mixed-use growth containing 900 residences, places of work, outlets, eating places and public house, with buildings. Earlier than that challenge can transfer forward, an modification to the Metropolis Constitution should be accredited by native voters in a referendum that might be positioned on the poll in November of 2024.
Demolition of Lumsden’s Bard Constructing and completion of the inexperienced house is predicted to take a few yr.