Homewood Campus Tour

The Maxine F. Singer Building, completed in 2005, is the home of the Department of Embryology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The department, a independent research center in cellular, developmental and genetic biology, has close ties to the Johns Hopkins Biology Department.

The Embryology Department had been located since the early 1960s in a building at the northwest corner of the Homewood campus, at the intersection of University Parkway and San Martin Drive. Previous to the completion of that building in 1962, the department had been located on the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions campus, where it was founded in 1913 in affiliation with the Anatomy Department in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The three-story, 79,000-square-foot Singer Building and its state-of-the-art laboratories were designed by Zimmer, Gunsul, Frasca Partnership of Washington. It is clad in variegated brick, metal panels and copper shingles with precast concrete trim and abundant glass, including several dramatic oversized windows. It was built starting in 2003, in conjunction with the adjacent San Martin Center, a 523-space parking garage topped by a two-story 46,000-square-foot office building.

The Singer Building-San Martin Center complex sits in the Stony Run valley below San Martin Drive on the western edge of the Homewood campus, on the footprint of what was previously a surface parking lot. The project included the transformation of an excavated depression back to a close approximation of the original gentle sloping down from the campus and San Martin Drive into the stream valley. The addition of green space and trees slows the runoff of storm water into Stony Run.

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