| Hello and welcome to Bloomberg’s weekly design digest. I’m Kriston Capps, staff writer and editor for Bloomberg CityLab and your guide to the world of architecture and the people who build things. This week Mario Schjetnan of Mexico City’s Grupo de Diseño Urbano won the 2025 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get the Design Edition newsletter every Sunday. For this week’s edition, Bloomberg CityLab’s David Dudley looks at a new Bjarke Ingels Group student center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. When Johns Hopkins University built a 50,000-square-foot student arts complex on its Baltimore campus in 2001, alums like me who lived nearby were a little salty about it. The building itself was fine — it was a modest modernist assemblage called the Mattin Center, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects — but it replaced a woodsy copse that comprised one of the university’s last undeveloped corners, fondly recalled by ex-students as a site of shady strolls and undergrad shenanigans. Just two decades later, TWBTA’s complex was demolished (something of a theme for the firm). This week its replacement officially debuted. And it’s a wild one: a circular clutch of glass boxes topped with 29 (!) solar-panel-equipped roofs spilling down a slope at the edge of campus. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group with Rockwell Group, Shepley Bulfinch, and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, this time it’s a full-on student center that adds another 100,000 square feet of space over its short-lived predecessor. The LEED Platinum-certified Bloomberg Student Center — named for JHU alumnus and benefactor Michael Bloomberg, also the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, parent company of Bloomberg News — is indeed a big new mass-timber project for Maryland. (But not the largest: That honor goes to Gensler’s Under Armour HQ.)  From above, the dimensions and shape of the student center mirror the circular knoll in front of the JHU library (right), a grassy gathering space students call the Beach. Photographer: Laurian Ghinitoiu The Mattin Center had some fans, but I don’t think residents outside JHU were aware it existed; it presented a mostly blank brick wall to the street and was often described as “fortress-like.” That’s not an issue with the Bloomberg Student Center, which runs screaming down the hillside to greet the city. Entrances beckon from each direction on all four of its levels. It’s skinned in more stainless steel than a parking lot of unsold Cybertrucks. At night, 85 multicolored lighting fixtures wink from within like giant Christmas tree bulbs. “The whole idea was that this would be a village,” said Lee Coyle, JHU’s senior director for planning and architecture, who led a recent tour in advance of the building’s grand opening. He described BIG’s vision of student groups coming together in a “carnival atmosphere” from all sides of campus and the adjoining Charles Village neighborhood. “You can’t help but notice it,” he said, with some understatement.  Built into the side of a hill, the student center features entrances at different levels on four sides. Photographer: Laurian Ghinitoiu The extroversion isn’t just an architectural change-up on a campus otherwise dominated by stolid Georgian buildings of various vintages. The activation of the streetscape with abundant patios and public space can be read as a gesture of goodwill toward Baltimore — whose relationship with its largest private employer has seen recent friction over issues like public safety and city payments. Spending $250 million on a building that you aren’t supposed to study in also sends a message about socializing to Hopkins students, who have a well-earned reputation for academic intensity. Get your heads out of your books, this building shouts, Spuds MacKenzie-style. It’s time to party. In student surveys, undergrads asked for more creative spaces, Coyle says, so the building’s offerings include up-to-date amenities like a gaming lounge in addition to dance studios, music rooms and a black-box theater. (Also a Hopkins first: an on-campus bar.) Inside, it smells faintly of Canadian spruce (from the exposed manufactured timber beams) and fresh coffee (from the food-hall-like cafes on the lower levels). Stadium-style seating spills down the center of the large main atrium, with students arrayed up and down a big sunlit space dubbed the Overlook Lounge. There was some foosball and shuffleboard action going on in the lounge during my visit, but most were lost in their laptops, if not actively studying.  Spruce timbers are left exposed inside the center’s main atrium. Photographer: Nic Lehoux Will this student center outlive its ill-fated forerunner? It better, if it’s going to recoup the carbon savings promised by its timber construction. “Twenty years from now, ‘How did we do?’ is a valid question,” Coyle said. “These buildings are products of their times.” The students of 2045 may have a whole new set of ideas about what constitutes fun; hopefully, there will be room for it under these 29 roofs. Design stories we’re writing |  The proposed statue of Prometheus on Alcatraz would be nearly three times larger than the Statue of Liberty. Courtesy of American Colossus Foundation After years of iconoclastic protests in which progressive activists removed statues devoted to the Confederacy, conservative-leaning tech investors now want to turn the page by building new monuments — really, really big ones. Crypto investor Ross Calvin hopes to build a 450-foot tall statue of Prometheus on Alcatraz Island that’s large enough to be visible across the Bay Area. Silicon Valley investor Elad Gil hopes to build a 500-foot-tall statue of George Washington and place it on a 150-foot pedestal — making it taller than the actual Washington Monument. These aspiring builders believe they have a strong ally in President Donald Trump. Sophie Alexander uncovers a new phenomenon: The monuments men of the tech right have arrived.  Designed by Hastings Architecture, the suburban Donelson branch of the Nashville Public Library system has been a boon for nearby local businesses. Photographer: Nick McGinn People ask a lot of libraries. Nowadays they lend tools and games — not just books. On top of reading rooms they provide makerspaces. A new generation of libraries has arrived, designed with the library’s status as an all-purpose social hub in mind. And just as the Trump administration has decimated library funding, these facilities are proving their worth. Arvelisse Bonilla Ramos writes about the knock-on economic benefit of public libraries, both for struggling downtowns that are shedding tenants and for suburban areas that lack public amenities. Design stories we’re reading |  Leave Dallas City Hall alone! Photographer: Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives Keep your damned hands off Dallas City Hall! As Mark Lamster explains, the city is considering demolishing I.M. Pei’s 1978 municipal building in order to make room for a potential arena development for the Dallas Mavericks. As a fan of Brutalism and Pei and this project in particular, I’m tempted to quote the whole story. But as a demoralized Mavs fan I need to point to the part about Luka Dončić: “Dallas taxpayers would be paying an enormous premium — and giving up their majestic, centrally located seat of government — for the benefit of real estate interests, the building industry and the billionaire owners of the basketball team that shipped the city’s favorite son out of town in the middle of the night and then raised ticket prices.” (The Dallas Morning News) The writing is on the wall for San Francisco’s Vaillancourt Fountain, a 1971 public plaza scultpure whose jumble of concrete beams graced endless spreads in Thrasher magazine. The columnist Herb Caen once described this unfriendly sculpture as a 10 on the Richter scale. (The New York Times) Read Ilana Amselem on the paradox of a sustainable mass-timber Amazon fulfillment center in Elkhart, Indiana: “It’s a warehouse that wants to be gentle. A factory that wants to be a forest. A high-tech logistics hub that insists you notice the smell of wood and the flutter of butterflies.” (The Architect’s Newspaper) Michael Kimmelman writes about Manresa Wilds, a billionaire couple’s project to convert a decommissioned oil-fired electric plant in Norwalk, Connecticut, and whether this adaptive reuse can serve as a model for other “peakers.” (The New York Times) It’s rare to see a design story about Kazakhstan that isn’t covering a starchitect’s bauble for the ruling party, so read Fran Williams’s piece about the nation’s first independent cultural center, an adaptive reuse project in Almaty by London’s Asif Khan Studio. (Architects’ Journal) | 
