Juniata College is a small liberal arts, Church of the Brethren–affiliated school founded in 1876 on a 110-acre tree-shaded campus that rises gradually to wooded hillsides on its northern edge. At its heart and bordering the main quadrangle is Founders Hall (1878, Stephen Decatur Button), a red brick, four-story building with a mansard-roofed tower. Counterclockwise around the quad from Founders Hall are the L. A. Beeghly Library (1963, Hunter, Campbell and Rea); the Halbritter Center for the Performing Arts (2005, Street Dixon Rick, Architecture); the Cloister (1928); Kennedy Sports + Recreation Center (1951, 1982, Hayes, Large, Suckling and Fruth); Maude Lesher Hall, originally East Hall (1957, Hunter, Campbell and Rea); and the William J. von Liebig Center for Science (2001, Hastings and Chivetta Architects). The Cloister, a red brick, gambrel-roofed, three-story building was designed by George Edwin Brumbaugh (1890–1983), son of Martin G. Brumbaugh, Juniata College president and governor of Pennsylvania from 1915 to 1919. Architect Brumbaugh, who trained at the University of Pennsylvania, worked with Mellor and Meigs and Charles Barton Keen in Philadelphia, and specialized in preservation work.
For over forty years, the college has commissioned the Altoona-based architectural firm Hunter and Caldwell through its various name changes (since 1991 Hayes Large) to design a series of what college historian Earl Kaylor called “contemporary Colonial style” buildings, meaning most are red brick with hipped or gable roofs. Their dormitories ring the North Lawn adjacent to the quadrangle. Only the rounded facade of the Brumbaugh Science Center (1965, Hunter, Campbell and
As it grew, the campus overtook two buildings designed by Beaux-Arts-trained Edward Lippincott Tilton (1861–1933), who worked with McKim, Mead and White in New York City, and specialized in theaters and libraries. Tilton designed what was Huntingdon's Carnegie Library (1906; 17th and Moore streets), with a two-story central pavilion and a pedimented, recessed entrance flanked by banded columns. Since 1961, it has been Juniata's Carnegie Hall. Tilton also designed the stone Gothic Revival Church of the Brethren (1910; 1701 Moore Street) for the denomination that founded the college.
The college has taken advantage of its pastoral location by sponsoring the 365-acre Raystown Environmental Studies Field Station headquartered in Shuster Hall (2004, HP Architects) and a restored log farmhouse (1825). With two adjacent residence halls, the complex is a lesson for students of sustainable architecture. The Field Station is fifteen miles southwest of campus on James Creek Road at the western shore of Raystown Lake. The unique Baker Peace Chapel (1989), a quiet, fourteen-acre green hillside space for contemplation and prayer less than a mile east of campus, was designed by landscape architect and sculptor Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.