About Us

ACE Baltimore’s objective is to give high school students an opportunity to explore career possibilities in the building professions. The affiliate is a unique partnership of architects, construction managers, trades professionals, engineers, designers, professional organizations, high schools and universities. These community-minded firms and organizations support our program with substantial contributions of time, money and other resources.

In our seventeenth year, ACE Baltimore has grown to fourteen multi-disciplinary teams with over 150 students from fifteen local schools across Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Howard County.

In addition, over 100 mentors from approximately 41 Baltimore-based firms meet with these teams weekly after school for construction site tours, visits to college campuses and team projects designed to inform, challenge and actively engage program participants.

Our Team Projects

How would you design the tallest building in Baltimore? What amenities would you desire in Baltimore’s new Arena? What kind of museum would you design? Each year our planning committee comes up with an exciting and innovative design theme for the teams to work on. We typically like to target a high-profile project that the students can follow in the local news. They have ranged from the tallest building, to arenas, to museums and even to college campus planning. The sky is the limit! And the creative results are impressive. Professionals from businesses involved in the real-world project attend our Presentation Night.

The program is approximately 13 weeks long with the teams meeting once a week for a couple of hours. The students learn the entire design, engineering and construction process along with considering such factors as a tight urban setting; the surrounding environments; potential historic and cultural areas; and the need to serve broad commercial and economic interests.

To arrive at a solution, the students perform programming exercises that help them determine the building’s function and appearance. Then, they do sketches, pinups and other tasks to simulate and clarify ideas and concepts. While the immediate result is a series of imaginative project solutions, the long-term benefit to team members is a practical understanding of how building industry teams realize their “big” ideas.