You stand, and look at the front entrance of The Johns Hopkins University. It is elegant. It is ceremonial. And it is the product of years of implementing a plan. It is the end result of following a carefully constructed recommendation about how the university should grow, a recommendation still being developed.
Nothing yet is certain.
And even after the master plan is established, it will not be so rigid as to exclude adaptation. He showed a photograph as Homewood stood in 1917, with Gilman Hall's arcades leading nowhere. He showed a photograph of Homewood in 1942, with a loop of road in front of an empty lot on which the Milton S. Eisenhower Library would eventually stand. And he showed an architect's rendering of what Homewood could look like at the turn of the next century, with buildings surrounding Garland Field, and a pedestrian overpass linking campus to Charles Village. Like the 1917 photograph showing the brick arcades leading from Gilman to the future sites of Mergenthaler and Ames, the master plan will be waiting, showing the way, when the university is ready to move forward.