The Texas legislature authorized the Texas School of Mines and Metallurgy in 1913. In 1919 it became part of the University of Texas as the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy, with a name change to Texas Western College in 1949 and to the University of Texas at El Paso in 1967.
A fire in 1916 destroyed the school’s earliest buildings at its initial site at what is now Fort Bliss. The City of El Paso gave the college a new site on a mountainside north of Sunset Heights. The dry hillsides reminded Kathleen L. Worrell, wife of the school’s first dean, Steven Worrell, of photographs of Bhutan, Tibet, and Sikkim that had been published in National Geographic magazine in 1914, and she suggested that the dzongs (fortified Buddhist monasteries) of Bhutan would make an appropriate model for the college’s new buildings. Local architects Charles Gibson and George Robertson made preliminary sketches based on the National Geographic photographs, but the contract for the earliest buildings (Old Main, Geology Building, Graham Hall, and Quinn Hall), all erected in 1917, was awarded to Trost and Trost. The most distinctive features of the campus buildings are the battered walls, decreasing in thickness by seven inches from bottom to top, and finished with tan stucco accented by wide horizontal bands of brick and tile. Buildings are pavilion-like blocks with low-sloping hipped roofs.
Old Main, a three-story rectangular building, exemplifies Trost and Trost’s Bhutanese interpretation, with its battered stucco-covered walls, shallow hipped roof with wide eaves, ornamental brickwork incorporated in a wide band linking the windows, and projecting window frames on the building’s third floor. A brick surround with a corbeled cornice frames the main entrance. Circular “mandalas” with simplified geometric patterns are set between the top-story windows.
The El Paso Centennial Museum (1937, Percy McGhee) was built with funding from the State of Texas Centennial Control Commission (created to fund monuments or buildings in each Texas county to commemorate the 1936 centennial of Texas independence). The museum, the first campus building to deviate from the rectangular building format, is U-shaped. It was also the first building to have exposed rubble stone walls, since the budget would not allow for exterior stucco. The windowsills and lintels are crudely formed concrete beams, and the roof’s rafters are of cast-in-place concrete. The museum’s collections focus on the natural and cultural history of the Chihuahua Desert region. McGhee was also architect of the Administration Building and Library (1938), the Cotton Memorial Building (1947), Magoffin Auditorium (1951), and the nucleus of the Student Union Building (1948).
Although some buildings deviated from the early-twentieth-century model—for example, the Geological Sciences Building’s addition (1968, Carroll, Daeuble, DuSang and Rand) to McGhee’s library, with its straight-sided, cast-in-place-concrete walls—Trost and Trost’s original campus style has been honored for the most part. The Undergraduate Learning Center (1997, Alvídrez Architecture) demonstrates that academic programs now require much larger buildings.
Twenty-first-century buildings feature projecting corner towers that strengthen and extend the Bhutanese imagery: the Biosciences Building (2005, Mijares-Mora Architects, with WHR Architects); the College of Health Science-School of Nursing Building (2011, PageSoutherlandPage); and the Interdisciplinary Chemistry and Computer Science Building (2011, Kaplan McLaughlin Díaz, with Jacobs Carter Burgess). A significant reconfiguration of campus open space was completed in 2015 to mark the centennial of the university’s opening (TenEyck Associates, landscape architects, with Lake|Flato).
Making architectural use of the campus’s dramatic desert topography is the 30,000-seat (now 51,500-seat) Sun Bowl, the university’s football stadium (1963, Carroll, Daeuble, DuSang and Rand, with Garland & Hilles Architects). It is partially burrowed into the steep upslope above the rest of the campus.
A new campus master plan (2011, Barnes Gromattzky Kosarek Architects, with Michael Dennis and Associates) created a central open space, the Memorial Triangle, as a focus for this campus, where space is often constricted by topography. A desert landscape of indigenous plants and granite boulders is highlighted by the Lhakhang, a white masonry and wood-roofed temple that visually anchors the campus architectural style to its historic precedent. The Lhakhang Cultural Exhibit building, donated to the people of the United States by the Kingdom of Bhutan, was first displayed in 2008 at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and is the only structure of its kind outside of Bhutan.
From the parking lot on the west side of Sun Bowl Drive one can see, to the northwest, the twenty-nine-foot tall limestone statue of Cristo Rey (1939) by Catalonian immigrant sculptor Urbici Soler. Positioned on a peak of the Cerro de los Muleros and looking south toward Ciudad Juárez, the devotional statue, and its dedication to Christ the King, are reminders of the Cristero Wars in Mexico of the 1920s and how conflict on one side of the U.S.-Mexico border is sometimes redressed symbolically from the other side.