Later this month the Decker Quad will open to the relief of the engineering and admissions staffs.
The tenants of the new?Decker Quad buildings?anticipate that Mason Hall and the Computational Science and Engineering Building (CSEB) will become the?new faces?of Hopkins in taking on the University's educational missions.
The upper levels of Mason Hall will house the Hopkins admissions officers who?currently reside in a disconnected?space in Levering Hall and throughout Garland Hall. Engineers have already begun unpacking into the CSEB, and to some, the move-in is?their own?unpacking from their former scant rooms.
"We no longer have to sit on top of each other," a grateful engineering staff member said.
However, these new buildings are intended to do more than merely allow for elbow room. The new?inhabitants appear to converge on the theme of perpetuating both Hopkins' rich traditions as well as the institution's academic direction.
For example the CSEB was built as an intentional step towards advancing the university's computational science engineering programs. The future of computational engineering requires extensive, seamless collaboration between different departments - thus, interdisciplinary collaboration is regarded as a key area of growth that the CSEB should be able to better support.
This vision called for faculty and students from the departments of Mechanical, Electrical and Biomedical Engineering, as well as Computer Science from disparate corners of the Homewood campus to work together and to collaborate with other JHU divisions such as the Hopkins School of Medicine and the Applied Physics Lab.
"Computational engineering doesn't fall within one department," explained Dr. Louis Whitcomb, director of the new Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) in the CSEB.
During CSEB's planning stages, the potential tenants all pitched in ideas to consider the people and projects to inhabit the building. Now the space will bring faculty together along with graduates, undergrads and staff - "forcing all of us to work together," Whitcomb said.
In the same spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration, a multimedia display is presently being designed for the CSEB. The installation will describe research and educational accomplishments of Hopkins engineering for campus visitors with topics covering engineering's impact on health care, security and extending human capabilities and education. All of these themes are intended to enhance outreach and collaboration within and beyond the Homewood community.
Mason Hall, located at the southern end of the Decker quad, is the new official visitors' center to replace Garland Hall as Hopkins' new public face. The new visitors' parking facility underneath the Decker Quad is entered from directly beneath to the entrance of building.
According to Maggie Kennedy, Admissions' manager of administration and communications, Mason Hall will be more than just a pretty building. In the past prospective students have been greeted at Garland Hall, but it is only remembered as just a quick stop during their visit. The entirety of Mason Hall will be dedicated to orienting the students with resources and information about the University, making it a true upgrade from Garland.
"It was built with us in mind; it's important for the coming students to get a good first impression," Kennedy said.
?The building of the Decker Quad has spanned over five years and has indisputably been the largest campus renovation project since the development of the Wyman and Keyser Quads. The idea of the Decker Quad took root in 1999 when the University committed to designing an improved master plan for the campus, and construction started to take place late in 2005. The idea was to fill the space between Clark Hall and the periphery of the Wyman Quad (also known as the Engineering Quad).
Four major research institutes will be housed in the CSEB. The researches of Institute for Computational Medicine (ICM) will involve advanced computational modeling of biological systems.
The Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) will be conducting world-leading research programs in the science and technology of language and speech. The LSCR and Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST) Engineering Research Center will be making use of the majority the building's lab space to undertake groundbreaking robotics research.