New England has plenty of quaint colleges in historic locales, but UMass Dartmouth, nestled in the forest of a town founded in 1664, is one of a kind.
The state university’s sprawling megastructures of textured concrete have puzzled students since the school opened in 1966, inspiring urban legends that the campus was built as a Cold War bomb shelter, or a monument to Satan, or a landing strip for alien spacecraft.
What’s true is that UMass Dartmouth is one of America’s largest and most unified works of Brutalism, the divisive architectural style that takes its name from the French words for concrete, béton brut.
The late Paul Rudolph designed the master plan for UMass Dartmouth in the early 1960s on a patch of farmland between Fall River and New Bedford. Rudolph, a star architect brought in by a 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 classical liberal arts education to the children of factory workers. (The first Brutalist megastructure they completed housed the school’s humanities departments.)
“Joseph Driscoll, the first president of the institution, realized the mills were fading away,” said Rudolph’s biographer, Timothy Rohan, a professor of architectural history.
Rudolph’s concrete architecture appealed to Driscoll, Rohan said, because it provided an affordable way to build on the scale of other established American universities.
“He felt that if you built big and if you built something that looked important and monumental, then it would become those things,” Rohan said.
Rudolph became one of the only architects in American history to design an entire college campus under one vision. (He drew inspiration from Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Florida Southern College.)
But as the campus Rudolph described as the clearest expression of his ideals turns 60 years old, a growing backlog of maintenance problems has put a staggering price on the cost of preserving it.
A maintenance consulting firm hired by the university, Gordian, estimates UMass Dartmouth has close to $660 million in overdue repairs and upgrades, a figure that Gordian estimated is above average for similarly sized universities. In a report delivered to the university last year, Gordian recommended demolishing or gut renovating many of UMass Dartmouth’s Brutalist buildings.
Addressing the maintenance needs will require a major public investment in Brutalist architecture at a time when the style is having a complex moment in the spotlight. At the Oscars, Adrien Brody won Best Actor for his performance of an emotionally tortured Brutalist architect. In Washington, D.C., President Trump has re-issued an executive order deploring Brutalist architecture.
Many Brutalist buildings from the 1950s and ‘60s have now reached the age where they require major repairs and reinvestment, but are still considered too modern and too controversial to be obvious candidates for historic preservation.
Crumbling concrete
At UMass Dartmouth, since the core of the campus was built all at once, similar problems have popped up in every building on the main green.
The campus is built on a series of wide terraces that extend into tiered classrooms and lecture halls, which makes it challenging to comply with handicap accessibility standards. The multileveled atriums in the center of each academic building — filled with hanging balconies, angular staircases, and sunken conversation pits — have the same accessibility problems.
Heating rooms with concrete floors, walls, and ceilings to a comfortable temperature is another challenge.
“We can’t add insulation and then sheet rock over it because it loses the integrity of the building,” said David Gingerella, UMass Dartmouth’s vice chancellor of facilities.
Perhaps most concerning, exposed sections of concrete are cracking, causing water damage and forcing the university to close off certain balconies and portions of staircases.
“We used to have a lot of leaks around campus,” said Gingerella, “and the way that they would solve them is they’d give you a bucket.”
“If the leak got worse,” Gingerella said, “they’d give you a bigger bucket.”
These are common problems in Brutalist buildings, and they’ve left many institutions questioning whether it’s worth maintaining Brutalist architecture. But Paul Rudolph’s work is especially endangered.
Kelvin Dickinson, a preservationist who runs the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, said close to 40 percent of Rudolph’s buildings (62 of his 168 known works) have already been demolished or altered beyond recognition.
“It’s a combination of the complexity of his buildings,” Dickinson said, “and the fact that his reputation kind of disappeared, and so you can’t preserve what people think is just some building by some average architect.”
A fallen star of modern architecture
This year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan displayed the first major retrospective of Rudolph’s work since the architect died in 1997.
Abraham Thomas, the exhibit’s curator, said Rudolph was one of America’s most famous architects before he “almost disappeared without a trace from the architectural mainstream” during the 1970s.
A decade earlier, Vogue, Life, and the New York Times Magazine had splashed pictures of Rudolph and his buildings across their pages. Rudolph was receiving commissions to design buildings on a scale that didn’t even exist yet. One of his megastructures, as he called them, was supposed to stretch for miles across the entire width of Manhattan, covering a proposed highway with several stories of housing and recreational spaces.
“He was really seen as the future hope for modern architecture,” Thomas said.
But when the economy hit a recession in the early ‘70s, Thomas said, architectural priorities shifted and Rudolph stopped receiving major commissions. Many of the megastructures he envisioned were never built.
Thomas said UMass Dartmouth wound up being the biggest megastructure Rudolph completed in the U.S. He started designing the school in 1963, and finished in the early ‘70s.
“He at the time said this was his most important project in terms of having complete control over the urban planning and the architectural intentions,” Thomas said.
The Met’s exhibit displays renderings of many Rudolph projects that later met the wrecking ball, or faced such extensive renovations they are no longer recognizable.
“There are so many examples of buildings that were left to deteriorate,” Thomas said, “and they’re all sort of millstones around the necks of these institutions that now steward these buildings.”
Preserving UMass Dartmouth
UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Mark Fuller said the university does not have enough funding to address the $660 million of renovation needs at one time. The school is still a relatively young public university with a large proportion of low-income students; 56 percent are first-generation college students.
Still, Fuller said the university will remodel buildings at a pace it can afford.
“You would have to drag me kicking and screaming out of here just to let somebody demolish it,” Fuller said.
UMass Dartmouth has already made some significant investments in campus renovations: the university finished a $43 million renovation of the library in 2012, prior to Fuller’s arrival, and a $45 million overhaul of the science and engineering building’s mechanical systems in 2022.
These renovations haven’t come without controversy: the library renovation enclosed part of Rudolph’s textured concrete exterior inside a new glass facade, angering some diehard fans of the architect.
The next major project will be a renovation of the liberal arts building, the first structure Rudolph completed on campus, at an estimated cost of $100 million. But the chancellor said he’s more committed than his predecessors to preserving Rudolph’s vision.
“People need to just understand how distinctive this place is, and what a national treasure it is, even though we are dealing with these deferred maintenance issues,” Fuller said.
“I think my job is to make the case about our uniqueness in terms of the need because of the way the campus was built, but also our uniqueness in terms of the campus itself,” Fuller said. “It’s an irreplaceable asset for the nation. And I think that’s the story we have to tell people.”
