What was shaping up to be one of this year’s architectural highlights in Baltimore won’t be opening this year after all.The new home of the Johns Hopkins University’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute, under construction on Wyman Park Drive, was supposed to be ready to occupy this fall.But during a recent community meeting about another campus project, Hopkins representatives said the Agora Institute’s opening has been pushed back due to construction delays, including supply chain issues. The fence around the construction site, which previously had signs that indicated an opening in late 2024, recently was updated to say, “OPENING 2025.”The institute was announced in 2017 after the Stavros Niarchos Foundation committed $150 million to launch an effort with Hopkins to build an academic forum dedicated to “strengthening democracy by improving civic engagement and civil discourse worldwide.”Hopkins selected the Renzo Piano Building Workshop of Genoa, founded by 87-year-old Renzo Piano, to be the design architect. The award-winning firm is known for such high-profile projects as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Shard skyscraper in London and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. This is Piano’s first building in Baltimore. Ayers Saint Gross of Baltimore is the architect of record and Olin of Philadelphia is the landscape architect.The site is a corner parcel next to the former Baltimore Marine Hospital that Hopkins owns. The design has two main sections: an area to the north for public meetings, conferences and events, dubbed the “Conversation Cube,” and a second cube to the south that will contain classrooms, labs and faculty offices, dubbed “The Factory.”The two sections are separated by a circulation space, and the northern cube is rotated at a 45-degree angle from the southern cube. Both are clad largely in glass as a sign of transparency, for both the institute and the structure that houses it. The glass is a departure from the brick and stone exteriors of many other Hopkins buildings.Lee Coyle, Johns Hopkins University’s senior director of planning and architecture. Photo by Ed Gunts.According to Lee Coyle, Hopkins’ senior director of planning and architecture, Piano didn’t want to mimic the Georgian-style architecture present on much of Hopkins’ Homewood campus. “The bricks and shutters didn’t go too far with him,” Coyle said. “He didn’t want to work in that medium.”Construction began in mid-2021. Work initially progressed steadily, as the building’s structural frame took shape and glass panels were lifted onto the exterior. In recent months, with the outer walls in place, it has been more difficult for anyone standing outside the building to monitor signs of progress inside. As a result of the delays, officials say, Hopkins is now aiming to open the building in early 2025.The SNF Agora Institute isn’t the only major building in Baltimore that has seen its opening pushed back. The Baltimore Business Journal reported this week that T. Rowe Price Group won’t be moving into its new headquarters at Harbor Point this year, as originally planned, also because of construction delays. Like Hopkins, T. Rowe Price is now aiming to move into its new headquarters in early 2025.