Completed in August 2008, the 883,000-square foot (82,031-m2) Hilton
Baltimore Hotel is located in downtown
Baltimore’s Inner Harbor area, adjacent to the Baltimore Convention Center. A sky bridge provides direct covered access to the 24-story, 757-room hotel that is a testament to the continued expansion and strengthening of the downtown area’s business community and tourism industry.
The facility contains 60,000 square feet (5,574 m2) of conference and prefunction facilities,a 200-seat restaurant with an additional 96 seats of outdoor dining, a 90-seat lobby bar and550 parking spaces.
“The Hilton Baltimore’s master plan reweaves two blocks of urban fabric that have stood as parking lots for over 20 years and creates safe, pleasant pedestrian connections to other important downtown destinations, including Camden Yards, Camden Station, theConvention Center and the Inner Harbor,” said Dan Freed, AIA, LEED, principal and project lead designer with RTKL Associates Inc., Washington, D.C.
“We wanted to make the hotel as outwardly focused as possible and only appropriate for Baltimore,” Freed continued. “Something that really made sense in Baltimore, both in the way it was laid out and the look of it, through its use of materials that were either locally or historically important to Baltimore.”
The hotel’s exterior features more than 200,000 square feet (18,580 m2) of metal wall panels from Moon Township, Pa.-based CENTRIA. The building’s off-white and silver hues give the hotel a modern and upscale appearance, and help it blend seamlessly with the connecting convention center. The project utilized 101,000 square feet (9,383 m2) of 20-gauge Econolap 3/4-inch (19-mm) metal wall panels in Off White with a smooth Fluorofinish coating; 99,400 square feet (9,234 m2) of 22/26-gauge, 2-inch (55-mm) horizontal Formawall Dimension Series metal wall panels in Silversmith with a smooth Sundance AM coating; and 5,355 square feet (497 m2) of 20-gauge IW Series IW-14A vertical metal wall panels in Silversmith with a smooth Sundance AM coating.
The project includes a variety of sustainable features, including a 28,000-square-foot (2,601-m2)green vegetated roof that reduces the building’s heat island effect, low-E window glazing, and regional and recycled materials. The building also uses existing district chilled water and steam systems, eliminating the need for a central plant.
Additionally, the hotel features a glass curtainwallsystem by Harmon Inc., Eden Prairie, Minn. The skylight structure and glazing system over the hotel’s front entrance was manufactured by Super Sky Products Inc., Mequon, Wis. HDI, Columbia, Pa., provided the metal railing systems, including the exterior metal railing that has an integrated light system and all interior railings, decorative, glass and exterior balconies for the guest rooms.
“We wanted to reinforce, or celebrate, Baltimore’s past, and a lot of that past is about its growth of shipbuilding, shipping in general, and the use of the harbor as a hub for the city, which was the element that allowed the city to grow,” Freed said. “We felt the CENTRIA panels allowed us to celebrate the industrial age of Baltimore and be true to its past links to the water in a way that people wouldn’t expect from metal.”
The building owner is Baltimore Hotel Corp., and Baltimore Development Corp. was the developer. RTKL Associates Inc. and McKissack & McKissack, Washington, D.C., were the architects; Hensel-Phelps Construction Co., Chantilly, Va., was the general contractor; RTKL Associates Inc., Baltimore, and Hope Furrer Associates Inc., Towson, Md., were the structural engineers; and Crown Corr Inc., Gary, Ind., was the dealer and installer.
CENTRIA
Harmon Inc.
HDI
Super Sky Products Inc.
