T. Rowe Price Headquarters

Taking advantage of its prominent site at the gateway to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the design for T. Rowe Price’s Headquarters provides a distinctive global headquarters for the investment management firm.

Revitalizing Baltimore’s Waterfront

One of Maryland’s oldest companies, T. Rowe Price was founded in Baltimore in 1937. As the company continues to evolve, it wanted to keep its headquarters in Baltimore and to be a catalyst for the city’s sustainable, community, and urban growth. In lieu of the traditional office building that would maximize efficiency through compacting and optimize cost through stacking, the design team set forth a different set of principles that would create value by reconnecting a community to place as well as redefining a flexible and future-oriented workplace for the next generation. Converting Harbor Point from a brownfield site opened new opportunities to reestablish pedestrian fluidity for the city’s urban edge. Through humanization in scale, site porosity, and use, the T. Rowe Price headquarters revitalizes the harbor front and sets a new standard for extending the city’s urban fabric.

Brownfield Redevelopment and New Use

Located on a reclaimed brownfield, the project mitigates pollution through a high-tech multi-media site cap and integrated groundwater control system. The land now supports a long-absent indigenous landscape that serves a variety of new community uses and active programs.

Site Porosity, Scale, and Connectivity

The intent was to transform a standard office building into two humanly scaled program bars to create a pedestrian streetscape that reinforces community access to the harbor front while creating a new public space. The two thinner office volumes allow for greater future flexibility as well as maximum natural daylight for the office.

Wrapped Park Over Podium

The fusion of podium and park promotes human connections and encourages wellness, health, and public interactions by blurring lines between landscape and program.

The Site’s Evolution

Baltimore’s inner harbor has been the city’s gateway to the world for over a century. However, as industry declined and the harbor became too shallow for larger ships, the city’s urban edge suffered, attracting little development for generations. In recent decades, the city has focused on transforming the harbor from an industrial zone to a major mixed-use district with an emphasis on tourism and public space.

Site and Views Analysis

KPF’s designers used proprietary computational tools to test dozens of massing configurations, optimizing sightlines to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor while minimizing shadow impact on the surrounding waterfront public realm.

Industrial Past

For nearly a century, the 27-acre parcel served as Allied Signal’s Baltimore Works, an industrial port facility, before operations ceased in 1985 and the site sat vacant for decades.

Chromium Contamination

During World War II, the plant produced most of the Allies’ chromium supply, a legacy that left the soil and groundwater contaminated, demanding extensive environmental remediation before redevelopment could begin.

Historic Scale and Massing

The design breaks the development into varied building heights, tying its massing to Baltimore’s historic urban grain and reinforcing a pedestrian-scaled experience along the revitalized waterfront.

Extending an Urban Fabric

The pedestrian-scaled structures are crafted with locally inspired materials that echo the city’s vernacular. Large windows in the lobby atrium and office spaces offer views of the harbor and bring natural light into the interior spaces.

The landscape at T. Rowe Price sets itself within a constellation of open spaces that make up the waterfront district of Harbor Point. Within and around the T. Rowe Price headquarters, the landscape strikes a carefully crafted balance between functional outdoor environments for tenants to enjoy and welcoming public open space for city residents to explore.

The design sets its roots in an interpretation of the soft, natural forms of the rivers and streams of the native Chesapeake Bay landscape—a landscape that in the Baltimore harbor has long been covered over by an industrial and maritime legacy that at its peak, saw the city as a global center for trade, industry, and innovation. Native and adaptive plantings, which are inspired by the grassy lowlands of the region, create a tapestry that is as interpretive as it is educational. The complementary design of site and architecture both represents a contemporary interpretation of Baltimore’s illustrious industrial past and makes good on desires to reconnect residents to its native, natural landscape.

A Forward-Thinking Workplace

The headquarters is LEED Gold certified and also includes public spaces, retail, roof gardens, and amenity spaces in addition to its office program. One of the most sustainable attributes a project can possess is the ability to accommodate unknown future change. The design embraces a two-part massing and utilizes large floor to floor heights to facilitate future flexibility. Connected by a mixed-use urban living room, the buildings can be segmented in multiple ways for a variety of future uses. Flexibility of the space extends to the building’s environmental performance, design around three priorities: energy reduction, occupant comfort, and water management.

Energy Reduction

Optimized daylighting, facade orientation, and solar-gain control reduce electric lighting, while an energy recovery unit recaptures ventilation energy and high-albedo surfaces mitigate heat island effect. Interventions cut overall energy use by 34% per MEP calculations.

Comfort

Tree canopy shading, courtyard-directed summer winds, and high-albedo pavements work together with the landscape design to improve thermal comfort and reduce urban heat island effect for pedestrians on the property.

Water Management

Rainwater harvesting supplies 82% of sanitary water demand, while low-flow fixtures cut indoor water use by 40%. Pervious green space with low-irrigation landscaping manage rainwater on site.

Located on the waterfront to the west of Wills Wharf and south of the Central Plaza and the Exelon Building, the headquarters is a part of Harbor Point, a 27-acre waterfront neighborhood currently under development. The mixed-use community will ultimately encompass three million square feet of office, retail, residential, and hotel uses, as well as 9.5 acres of open space. New public infrastructure in the form of public roads, utilities, and an extension of the waterfront promenade will complement privately financed buildings and public parking.

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T. Rowe Price Headquarters

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