To the south, the sun splashes across the Harbor, with the Key Bridge looming in the distance and downtown Baltimore encroaching in the foreground. The Keyser Quad, to the east, is flushed with students emerging from class, crossing in all directions. Beyond the roof of the MSE Library, Union Memorial Hospital's new helipad is equipped with a helicopter perched atop, ready for liftoff.
My brief spiritual moment with Baltimore came to an abrupt end as I heard a loud bang from one floor below, followed by the sound of drilling that I had become accustomed to over the past hour.
I was standing just steps below the Bell Tower in Gilman Hall. This is a view many students have not had the privilege of seeing for the past few months.
Behind me stood my tour guides, Martin Kajic, project manager for the renovation of the historic building, and Eddie Delluomo, superintendent of the site for Bovis Lend Lease. Despite my momentary serenity on the top-floor of Gilman, what lay below was far from serene.
A construction site, I learned, is not that much unlike a warzone.
Observing the site I sensed a meticulously planned and ordered chaos. Men in helmets walking around with an urgent sense of purpose, debris strewn across the floor, floorboards missing, a dusty odor that might be mistaken for gunpowder by the untrained nose and of course the constant crashing, banging and drilling make Gilman nearly unrecognizable from its previous position as the home to the humanities at Hopkins.
The Albert Hutzler Reading Room, the most recognizable of Gilman's rooms, was stripped bare.
With no desks, chairs, couches, lamps, paintings, book stacks or books, the HUT is more beautiful than ever (although much less useful, especially when it comes to napping on a cold December night).
The floor to ceiling columns stand alone, holding up the room's ridiculously high ceiling, while a stray ladder lingers off in the corner. The detailed moldings along the walls and columns bask in the white light that pours through the iconic stained glass windows. Still, the room's flaws are all the more conspicuous, including stains from water damage to plaster in many corners of the room.
"We don't want to touch it too much," Kajic said, referring to the HUT.
Aside from fixing the water damage on the walls, restoring the stained glass windows, which will be outsourced to a specialist, and updating the heating, cooling and wiring, which will include added outlets, the only real change to the reading room will be group study sections built on either side of the room that will be enclosed in clear glass, "but will still feel very much part of the room," Kajic said.
Memorial Hall, which houses the Hopkins seal engraved in its floor, will also remain mostly untouched. The walls and the checkered marble floor are fully covered for protection during the renovation.
This certainly is not the case in the rest of the building. On the ground floor, where the old college bookstore once stood, there is now a giant pit.
The gaping hole will become a new mechanical room, a feature the old Gilman Hall did not have. The mechanical room will contain energy efficient systems that are in accordance with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards, which are a slew of standards for environmentally sustainable construction.
Gilman Hall will be the first LEED certified building on campus. To attain the certification, the new building will feature many more efficient systems including occupancy-sensing lighting, a 30 percent reduction of potable water use and the removal of all window-unit air conditioners, to name a few.
The Donovan Room, which had been used mainly as a film screening room, will become a 55-person classroom. As a screening room, Donovan's beautiful curved windows were usually covered, wasting the aesthetic beauty of the room.
The film and media studies department will have new screening rooms with improved technologies in Gilman.
Gilman will also become a much more easily maneuverable and logical building, according to Kajic. Stairs will no longer run into dead ends; it won't be a treasure hunt to find a bathroom or a 10-minute chore to find your professor's office.
"The old stairs were narrow and posed problems for fire safety," Kajic said.
Both spiral staircases that were on the north and south ends of the building have been completely removed, leaving a four-story-high brick shaft that bears a resemblance to a squared industrial smokestack.
"The new ones will fix those problems and keep the circular design," Kajic said. "Bathrooms will be in the same place on each floor."
"Academic departments in Gilman never had a front door. They were usually in the back of the building and often very difficult to find," Kajic said.
The new building will create a "main street" which will make all department offices accessible directly off the main stairwell.
Gilman's exterior will be left almost exactly as it is, with the exception of the replacement of its windows and the cleaning of its bricks.
"From the outside it doesn't look like we're doing a whole lot," Delluomo said. He explained that given the site's central location on the campus and its close proximity to the President's house, it is important that the construction remain quiet and mostly unnoticed. Even from the back of Gilman, where the construction team, which includes 90 people on site a day, is based, there are only a few trucks and trailers lined up.
There is still more work to be done towards this $74-million construction. For the next three months the construction team will be doing demolition work.
Gilman Hall is slated to open for the first day of classes of fall semester 2010. Until then, students, enjoy your hike to the Dell house for class. Don't be late.
