Regents Hill

Together with Scott Coman Hall just to its northwest (completed in 1958), the complex ushered in a new era of campus design featuring large, technologically sophisticated, light-filled concrete buildings for research, teaching, and residential life.

Perched on a hilly rise at the northeastern edge of the campus, the 400-student residence was promoted as a "dream dormitory" for women and may have been the first residential hall in the Pacific Northwest with evident ties to European modernism.

Connecting the growing college to mainstream trends in European architecture, the principal residential wings of Barnard and McGregor Halls feature an open-air stair-and-balcony tower that joins them at the campus-facing corner, reminiscent of Dutch modernist Jan Duiker's Open Air School in Amsterdam.

The wings, too, feature strip windows suggestive of modern machinery and are elevated above the ground level by small reinforced concrete columns, resembling the "pilotis" of Le Corbusier's architectural experiments of the 1920s.

Several large rocks are scattered loosely about the landscape, yet their seemingly random placement might have been intentional to reveal the connections between eastern and western cultures; broadly suggestive of Washington state's geography on the Pacific Rim.