The "South Quadrangle," as the planned quad on the
Homewood campus has been informally known during the design
process, has now been officially named the Alonzo G. and
Virginia G. Decker Quadrangle, in honor of the Baltimore
couple's decades of service to and generosity toward Johns
Hopkins.
The university's board of trustees voted in June to
name the new quad, which will rise west of Shriver Hall,
replacing what is now a parking lot. Garland Hall will form
its northern edge.
Alonzo Decker Jr., the longtime chairman and CEO of
Black & Decker Corp. who died in 2002, was a university
trustee and presidential counselor for more than 30 years.
He chaired the university's groundbreaking Hopkins Hundreds
fund-raising campaign in the 1970s. Virginia Decker has
been a member of the advisory council for the School of
Professional Studies in Business and Education.
"The development of this important new quadrangle as
the southern gateway to Homewood is a perfect opportunity
for us to honor the Deckers and their commitment to Johns
Hopkins," President William R. Brody said. "Just as Al and
Virginia have helped advance the university on so many
fronts, Decker Quadrangle will help build our future in
undergraduate education, interdisciplinary research,
service to the community and our alumni, and areas as yet
uncharted."
Site preparation work for the quad has already begun,
and full-scale construction will start in September. A
28,000-square-foot admissions and visitor center, which
will also house facilities for alumni meetings, will anchor
the quadrangle on its southern edge, facing out toward the
community and serving as a welcoming landmark for
prospective students and other visitors. A
79,000-square-foot interdisciplinary computational sciences
building will define the quad's eastern border; Clark Hall,
the biomedical engineering building completed in 2001,
stands across from the computational science site. The quad
also contains two sites for future buildings.
Underneath Decker Quad will be a three-level,
604-space garage, covered by a grass field. The garage will
provide parking for university employees and visitors and
for the nearby Baltimore Museum of Art. The project is
scheduled for completion in 2007.
Alonzo Decker headed Black & Decker Corp., the company
his father co-founded, from 1964 to 1975 and was
instrumental in the development of the portable home
electric drill and the portable drill. A graduate of
Cornell University, he was awarded an honorary degree from
Johns Hopkins in 1986. Starting in the early 1970s, he and
Virginia Decker contributed millions of dollars in support
of programs on the Homewood campus, at the Peabody
Institute and at Johns Hopkins Medicine. More than $7
million in proceeds from the sale of Alonzo Decker's final
gift, a bequest of the couple's home and farm property on
the Sassafras River on Maryland's Eastern Shore, will help
fund construction of Decker Quadrangle.
That gift counts toward the $2 billion Johns Hopkins:
Knowledge for the World fund-raising campaign, which began
in July 2000 and is scheduled to end in 2007. Commitments
to the campaign now total more than $1.81 billion, more
than 90 percent of the goal. (See story, "Campaign on track to $2 billion,"
in this issue.)
For more details on the project, go to
www.jhu.edu/~gazette/2005/11jul05/11quad.html.
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