Designing for Collaboration and Control

Conceptualized as an innovative model for 21-st century networking and interdisciplinary collaborative research, Malone Hall is an ambitious addition to the Johns Hopkins University campus. 

A four story, 69,000 square-foot building located on the University’s Homewood Campus, Malone Hall’s interior is a sleek, stylish, open floor design that blends three floors of flexible computer lab, office, and collaboration spaces with one floor of wet research labs. Glass doors and luxurious wooden hallway walls play off of the polished sheen of a stunning terrazzo raised access floor to provide a modern, interactive and cross-disciplinary environment where the world’s best minds can work together seamlessly.

The evolving needs of Malone Hall’s students and faculty were satisfied by the layout flexibility provided by a raised access flooring, but the decision was also informed by sustainability goals and specific application needs.

The University works from an internal edict to design for high efficiency in new construction. This made the decision to incorporate underfloor air distribution and variable air volume controls, as part of a larger collection of sustainable design elements, an easy one. Additionally, the multiple branches of the Computer Science department which are located in Malone Hall share the space with the new Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI). HEMI, which was created to lead a national initiative to provide the U.S. Department of Defense with lighter, more protective armor, conducts testing which requires tightly controlled pressurization, air distribution, and thermal control.

Now completed, the project is currently pursuing LEED Gold certification, citing sustainable design elements such as a variable-air-volume underfloor air distribution system, radiant heating, a heat re-utilization system, energy recovery systems, LED lighting, daylight harvesting, and sub-metering of power and other building utilities.