The building was designed to fill with light. Sun streams from a ceiling that seems mostly skylight, through windows that overlook the outside world. Glancing upward from an area called “the fishbowl,” students and visitors catch glimpses of lessons, collaborations, and meetings through interior windows ― a mosaic of moments of learning.
Over 10 years after its creation, the Anne and Mike Armstrong Medical Education Building (AMEB) remains a visual testimony to the power of illumination. Opened in 2009 after three years of construction, the building was built to house the then-new School of Medicine’s Genes to Society curriculum, centered on the ways that variables like environment, genotype and risk impact both health and disease.
And even as that research has shed new light on medical science and blazed a path to new therapies, the building has nurtured a decade of student careers.
“First, I thought, it beautifully served the purpose of having the most advanced medical school curriculum in the world,” said C. Michael Armstrong, a former board chairman for Johns Hopkins Medicine who donated $20 million toward the building that bears his name, recalling his first impressions of the newly constructed building. “Second, I loved the design and the layout because it enabled us to be wrong. It’s one thing to pat yourself on the back and say ‘Gosh we got most of it right,’ but we built that building to be flexible and if it needed one thing more than another, that could be incorporated ― because that was built into the layout.”
The Armstrong Medical Education Building was designed to reflect and adapt to the rapid pace of change in medical technology. That meant rooms that could be used for multiple purposes and that went beyond the lecture hall format to foster collaboration and group work. A former business executive for IBM, Hughes Electronics, AT&T and Comcast, Armstrong was heavily involved in the design of the building, meeting frequently with the task force that explored the needs and requirements of the building. “The world of medicine was becoming increasingly discovered with new innovation, new medicine, new techniques, new surgeries,” Armstrong says. “So building a building that could adapt to change had to be inherent in its fundamental design.”
As Hopkins students settled into AMEB, taking advantage of amenities ranging from group meeting rooms to comfortable sofas to make it a hub of campus activity, they left their own imprint. In 2017, a two-year, student-led project resulted in the transformation of a small strip of nearby lawn into a memorial garden. The garden, a contemplative space adorned with a small labyrinth and windchimes, is dedicated to both the anatomical donors who make their studies possible, and the living volunteers who help students learn to conduct medical exams and take histories.
Today, over a decade since its construction, the Armstrong Medical Education Building remains a striking example of blended design and purpose. And that, Armstrong says, was always the intention.
“I wanted it to be an extraordinary building,” he says. “I wanted it to be a beautiful building. I wanted it to be a functional building. I wanted it to be a simple building. One of the most complex environments known to mankind is the medical environment because it’s under constant change. So it couldn’t be fancy ― it had to be straightforward. Hopkins is not a fancy place, it’s a straightforward place, they do things to change history and they do things to change the fundamentals of life.
“But another thing that really drove me was that Hopkins is training some of the future extraordinary doctors and researchers of the medical world. And for them to not only learn at the leading-edge level but also to learn at the functional and at the beautiful level was important.”