2019-04-21 - Mattin Center

The Mattin Center was a building on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It was demolished by the university in a BIG mistake, to replace it with another building of lesser quality.

The Mattin Center was designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Associates of New York City. There are one of my favorite contemporary architecture firms, and their work carries on the lessons of many of the outlier Modernists who never forgot the need for texture, variety, scale or circulation in strong buildings. It was apparent during my visit that the university had stopped maintaining the building, which foreshadowed its demise not long after. 

This building was a locus of the arts within a university known for hard sciences. It was organized in four separate parts, with varied pathways of connection between. Circulation is not always straightforward. The meandering path though has its advantages. Humans need breaks in their activity to allow the mind to wander; all the better if we are actually wandering at the same time. Williams and Tsien are careful and cognizant to provide both stairs and accessible ramps in their architecture. Wandering is encouraged by everyone, even those without an artistic spirit.

I first encountered this quote in a book on the work of the the architecture firm Morphosis, but I think it applies to the work of TWBTA just as well.

If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows—perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places.

Italo Calvino "Six Memos for the Next Millennium

I visited early on a weekend morning and was not able to see much inside past what is visible through the doors and windows. The buildings are clad in several types of brick, some with a darkened finish over the red clay that very much feels painterly in a Jackson Pollock or Clyfford Still kind of way. This material choice gives the building a coherences and also a sense of variety. The materials are ordinary and maybe not even precious, but they have character and variety that feels very human. The contemporary practice of architecture is less about design and more about the successful orchestration of thousand of mass produced elements flying in close formation. Whenever we can find variety and uniqueness within a world which aims for repetitive uniformity, I think that is a win. Too bad that the powers that be at JHU didn't think it was a lesson worth maintaining.

Camera:  Unknown Samsung Phone
Medium: Digital