

Finch started by carefully examining some of Monet’s famous Water Lilies paintings, shimmering with the interplay of color, light, flora and water.īringing the beauty of nature into the design required hard-core engineering, notes Nancy Rosen, the art curator who worked with a Johns Hopkins committee to select art for the new building. The concept for the color palette and the frit is the brainchild of artist Spencer Finch. That mosaic is composed of colored metal panels in 26 shades of blue, green and yellow that are placed in a “shadow box” fashion behind the building glass, which has a custom ceramic frit pattern to evoke the feeling of light reflecting on water.

Bloomberg Children’s Center reveal themselves as graceful shapes wrapped in a mosaic of blues and greens.
Johns hopkins social scene series#
There, lined at ground level with a series of gardens, the Sheikh Zayed Tower and The Charlotte R. The story starts as you approach the building, which opened May 1. “The design is a shared narrative that comes from the many dynamic voices in Johns Hopkins,” he says.“And that includes the most important voices of all: the voices of the patients.”Įvery component of the hospital’s artwork and the building’s interior look and feel reflect comments the designers directly solicited from Johns Hopkins staff and administration, as well as from patients and their families.

But in this case, the art also serves another role: It is, in a sense, a pointer to the hospital’s hugely ambitious design-a design intended to turn an entire hospital into a work of light, color, nature and healing, even as it houses the world’s most advanced medical science and patient care.Īs Allen Kolkowitz, the consulting architect for the Johns Hopkins project, puts it, it’s a building complex that tells a story. It’s not unusual, of course, to come across art in a hospital, where lovely images can provide a modest but much-needed lift.
Johns hopkins social scene windows#
Suffused with subtleties of light and hue, the windows are designed to instill a feeling of calm. The colors found in the windows were based on the celebrated painter’s works, and in particular his Water Lilies series. If the facade of Johns Hopkins’ newly opened patient care building seems unusually warm and vibrant, give some of the credit to Claude Monet. The new Johns Hopkins building gets the Monet treatment, using the master’s palette for innovations in light, color and nature to create a calming, healing environment for patients
