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What looks like a cross between a graphic design firm’s office and a hip hotel lobby, is 69,000 square feet, and might be the location where people figure out how to save the world from colliding with an asteroid? Johns Hopkins’ gleaming new computer science engineering building, of course.

The most exciting thing about the new, four-story building is that it contains no classrooms at all. That’s not because the architect somehow forgot them; rather, it’s a way of putting the computer science department engineering department’s collaborative ethos into practice. Conference room-like spaces and computer labs encourage groups to work together; glass-enclosed spaces with flat-screen monitors make it easy to conference via video.

“The large number of interaction spaces will facilitate bringing people together in the most effective ways to encourage the type of interdisciplinary work we want to do here,” Ed Schlesinger, the Benjamin T. Rome Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering, told the Hopkins Hub. “We’ll have engineers and scientists from many disciplines working side by side as they attempt to solve vexing problems and forge new areas of work.”

UPDATE: This post has been edited to reflect that way more than just computer science will call the new building home — Malone Hall will also house the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, the Information Security Institute, and several other institutes affiliated with the Whiting School of Engineering.