Aluminum 'Monet' Rises Above Baltimore Skyline

Johns Hopkins Hospital's new Bloomberg Children's Center incorporates aluminum panels to provide a colorful and visually arresting facade that looms above the Baltimore skyline.

The building's exterior curtainwall features aluminum panels of 26 colors encased within a "shadow box" construction of two layers of glass. Brooklyn artist Spencer Finch created the design for the facade, whose colors and texture were inspired by Claude Monet's Impressionist landscape paintings.

Finch opted for blue as the dominant color of the building's facade and green for that of the adjoining Sheik Zayed Tower, an adult-care facility.

"From the beginning we were thinking about glass as an analog 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 result is a shimmering exterior that captures the light of the sky, allowing the building to change in sync with the environment, establishing it as a natural and inviting presence.

Known for his mastery of light and color, Finch spent months testing and developing a broad range of colors for the building's exterior, even observing test panels on the roof of a garage across from the Bloomberg Children's Center site to understand how his palette would play with Baltimore's light. Then he worked closely with the architects, who provided technical guidance, to devise the best way to execute his vision and ensure that the colors remain true.

"We went back and forth a lot to really think about the connection between materials used and how the colors would be perceived, since this is a work of art that will be around for a long time as part of the building," says Eric Van Aukee of Perkins + Will, managing principal on the project. "So we put a system together with crystal clear glass that would always render Finch's true colors and we tested it rigorously to ensure that it would stand up to the elements such as sun, high winds, condensation and rain.

"For other buildings, the art is usually done as an application to the exterior in the form of a specific work," says Aukee, "but here, the art is very integrated into the functionality of the building. With Spencer, we were really able to transform the approach to the skin of the building—thinking of it not just as protection but also as a canvas. Together we turned a piece of building protection, the 'building envelope,' into a work of art."