UMass Dartmouth is tucked away in the forest of a historic New England town, but the buildings here defy most people’s expectations of what college is supposed to look like.
The main green’s sprawling Brutalist buildings have puzzled students since the school opened in 1966, inspiring urban legends that the campus was built as a monument to Satan, or a Cold War bomb shelter, or a landing strip for alien spacecraft.
What’s true is that UMass Dartmouth is one of America’s largest and most unified expressions of Brutalism, the controversial style that takes its name from the French words for concrete, béton brut.
The late Paul Rudolph, who partially inspired Adrien Brody’s Oscar-winning character in “The Brutalist”, designed the school in the early 1960s on 710 acres of farmland and forest between Fall River and New Bedford. Rudolph, a star architect brought in by the firm that won Massachusetts’ public bidding process, was supposed to design a technical institute serving the local textile industry.
Instead, he and the school’s founding president built a university they hoped would provide a well-rounded education to the children of factory workers. (The first Brutalist megastructure they completed housed the school’s humanities departments.)
In lectures and interviews, Rudolph said concrete enabled him to build affordably on a monumental scale, creating a dignified campus that would echo classical works of architecture.
But as the campus Rudolph considered his magnum opus turns 60 years old, many of the Brutalist structures are reaching a pivotal moment.
The campus’ wide staircases, tiered classrooms, and multileveled atriums fail to meet modern standards of handicap accessibility. One of those atriums has a hanging balcony with structural issues. The campus’ concrete walls and ceilings have proven challenging to insulate as the university seeks to improve energy efficiency.
Outdoor staircases are also crumbling, and the concrete buildings are notorious for springing leaks.
“Concrete is not necessarily the easiest thing to maintain and reconfigure,” UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Mark Fuller said.
UMass Dartmouth invested $43 million in a renovation of the library completed in 2012, which enclosed Rudolph’s textured concrete inside a glass box, and the university invested another $54 million in an overhaul of the engineering building’s mechanical systems completed in 2022.
But looming behind these sporadic renovations is a growing backlog of overdue repairs and upgrades with a staggering price: a maintenance consulting firm hired by the university, Gordian, estimates UMass Dartmouth has close to $660 million in deferred maintenance needs.
A report Gordian delivered to the university last year recommended gut renovation or demolition of many of the original Brutalist buildings.
It’s a familiar situation for Rudolph’s visionary (but sometimes impractical) buildings to fall into. A recent retrospective exhibit of Rudolph’s career at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art highlighted numerous Rudolph buildings that have been demolished.
The hand-drawn renderings on display showcasing Rudolph’s legendary draftsmanship included a housing project in Buffalo and an ambitious corporate campus for a North Carolina pharmaceutical company — both of which met the wrecking ball.
Across the country, Rudolph’s buildings have encountered the same problem as other Brutalist structures: they are aging, but are still considered too modern and too controversial to be obvious candidates for preservation.
“There are so many examples of buildings that were left to deteriorate,” said Abraham Thomas, the curator of the Met’s Rudolph exhibit, “and they’re all sort of millstones around the necks of these institutions that now steward these buildings.”
Kelvin Dickinson, president and CEO of the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, said that of the 168 projects Rudolph constructed in his lifetime, 62 have already been demolished.
UMass Dartmouth’s leaders have yet to identify funding sources for many of the Brutalist buildings on campus in need of expensive renovations. But Fuller said the maintenance backlog can be managed, and that none of the buildings have fundamental structural issues.
“You would have to drag me kicking and screaming out of here just to let somebody demolish it,” said Fuller, who became the university’s chancellor in 2021.
This summer, UMass Dartmouth is set to begin an almost $100 million renovation of its liberal arts building, the first structure Rudolph completed on campus.
