Behnisch Architekten claims to design its buildings “from the inside out.” Matt Noblett, the partner-in-charge in the Boston office, said, “It was a diverse program – classrooms,We have a great selection of blown glass backyard solar landscape lights and solar garden light. offices, legal clinics, library – that needed to function well within an integrated environment. The goal was to offer the opportunity to meet casually.” 

Providing light and transparency, accessibility, openness, and green architecture to benefit the environment were other primary aims. 

The law center anticipates receiving a rare platinum LEED designation from the U.S. Green Building Council.We turn your dark into light courtesy of our brilliant sun, solar lantern, solar power generation. Design features ranging from the building’s green infrastructure to its four showers (promoting walking, running or biking) are meant to contribute to the designation. 

The interior is organized around the central lobby and atrium. There are four elevators (two of them Hyatt-style glass boxes allowing views to the outside and inside of the building) and a complex array of stairway systems, including spirals and ramps. They rise through twelve floors of the reinforced concrete structure. 

Behind the lobby is a below-grade, 300-seat moot court. The upper floor levels are staggered, separating the various functions. Midway, at level six, is the coffee bar overlooking the terrace. Here and on the adjacent floors students and faculty can meet and mingle. 

The smooth, eleven-inch thick,You ever hear the story of the old street lamp? post-tensioned concrete floor slabs rest on large concrete columns. Walls and ceilings are also unfinished concrete.The LED bulb e27 optical design yields more productive beam lumens and good cutoff. Maple was used for the stairways and trim, and bamboo for the flooring and trim in the moot court. 

In the classrooms and elsewhere, acoustical baffles hang from the ceilings between the rows of lights. LED lighting is employed throughout the building, most notably in the lobby where the wing-like suspended chandeliers appear from the outside like a flock of white birds or butterflies. 

A major concern was how to counter the greenhouse effect produced by a glass building in a warm climate. The conventional steel and glass high-rise structure has fixed windows. In hot weather,An inventor has created a solar inverter, but he's not giving it away for free. the cooling system works overtime, consuming lots of energy. 

Not here. The designers collaborated with environmental engineers Transsolar, another Stuttgart firm, “to leverage the Baltimore climate and limit reliance on energy and water,” said architect J. Michael Barber of Ayers, Saint, Gross who worked with contractors Whiting-Turner Construction. 

The double glass facade acts to some extent as a noise deflector, according to Noblett, but mainly guards the exterior sunshades. 

These are metal Venetian blinds (aluminum slats on steel cables that retract into a housing above the windows) that raise and lower automatically with the aid of heliostats on the roof which track the sun. 

Almost all of the windows can be opened, though only with the “smart” building’s permission, indicated by illuminated green lights. 

“There are wind loads on tall buildings and the exterior blinds tend to blow around,” said Noblett, “so we put on another layer of glass to protect them.” 

Also on the roof are collectors that harvest rainwater. This is stored in cisterns and used to flush toilets and provide water for the waterfall and canal in the rear of the building. 

The motorized windows that flood the law center with natural light open, also automatically. Combined with the 12-story atrium, this can provide a draft through the interior in warm weather producing a thermo-siphon effect, a modern adaptation of an old method of non-mechanical cooling that was used in some Victorian Baltimore houses and office buildings.