McNamara Alumni Center

Known primarily for his works in the desert, the design for the McNamara Alumni Center (also known as the Minnesota Gateway Center) continues Antoine Predock's exploration of landscape forms as architecture. In his own words, "seen both as the casual and formal heart of the building, the Memorial Hall is an irregular polyhedron of colliding granite planes and glazed fissures which allow sunlight into this large open gathering space. Abstracting the granite strata of Minnesota, with the admixture of water, the Memorial Hall rises out of the ground as an 'upheaval,' binding the building to the place." Inside the large hall, one can see the play of light that filters through the fissures across the balcony projections whose copper skins further exemplify the tectonic nature of the building.