(geese honking) - UMass Dartmouth is tucked away in the forest of an historic New England town, but the buildings here defy expectations of what college is supposed to look like.

What words do you hear students use to describe the buildings here?

- Um, spaceship, um, alien.

- [Ben] Elizabethe Plante is a social worker who helps students adjust to life on campus.

- [Elizabethe] The students you know, will say, this is unusual.

I don't know if they understand where it came from or brutal architecture, what that means.

(bell ringing) - [Ben] While some people find the architecture ugly and depressing, filmmaker Will Lepczyk sees it differently.

In his documentary "Concretetopia," Lepczyk captures what he calls UMass Dartmouth's intense beauty.

- [Narrator] Brutalism is perhaps the most striking brand of late modernism.

It's a style defined by imposing geometry, wrought in concrete.

- [Ben] Every building on the main green at UMass Dartmouth is made of concrete.

Concrete pillars support a skyline of concrete rooms.

Inside, hallways are lined with textured concrete.

They open up into tall atriums with angular staircases and hanging balconies.

Every inch of every building on the main green is a connected mega structure.

On a recent visit, I talked to students who found the architecture both interesting and confusing.

- People didn't like the campus that much.

They were like, compared it to a prison of sorts and like "Star Wars."

But I learned that the architect that built it actually worked on prisons and it actually was just kind of his like, style that he went with.

- It was built to be able to withstand the bomb during like a time of war.

- I'm not really sure, that's one of the things I heard about it.

- Apparently the guy that designed it had some interesting ideas.

He actually wanted to land flying cars on the roofs.

- I've heard that people thought he was like a satanist, because there's a couple benches right over there that if you look at 'em from like, an angle from over there, it's like 666.

- [Ben] The man who designed the campus, Paul Rudolph was neither a satanist nor a prison architect.

He was a brutalist.

The term comes from the French words for raw concrete (Ben speaking in French).

Rudolph helped pioneer the brutalist style we see in places like Boston City Hall and the Barber Can in London.

- My campus, which I showed you at the beginning of my remarks, this is part of the library.

- [Ben] That's Rudolph lecturing at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in 1995, two years before he died.

- [Rudolph] The whole campus is built out of a special concrete block, I forgot to say.

- [Ben] To better understand who Rudolph was and why his reputation is so complicated, (car horns honking) I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.

So this is one of the ones that got demolished, isn't it?

- [Abraham] Yeah, this is, this was his first architectural office in New York.

- [Ben] Abraham Thomas recently curated a retrospective of Rudolph's work.

- I love how just, it's just an architectural office, but he already gives you a sense of his inventiveness.

Paul Rudolph was what I would consider a second generation modernist and one of the, you know, most successful architects of his time.

- [Ben] The exhibit showcases what some would call Rudolph's genius, for envisioning how concrete could change the way buildings look.

Many of these renderings for clients were never constructed, but his master plan for UMass Dartmouth was.

- I think he at the time said this was his most important project in terms of having complete control over the kind of urban planning and the kind of architectural sort of intentions behind that project.

- [Ben] In the 1960's, Rudolph was getting the kind of control he wanted, when the state of Massachusetts handed him 700 acres of farmland to build a technical institute.

It was meant to support the textile factories in nearby cities like Fall River and New Bedford.

But Rudolph and the school's founding president had a grander vision.

They imagined a university for the children of factory workers that would stand the test of time.

Rudolph saw concrete as an affordable way to build this campus on a monumental scale that echoed classical architecture.

But time has not always been kind to the campus.

Some of the concrete at UMass Dartmouth is now crumbling.

- I think concrete is not necessarily the easiest thing to maintain and reconfigure.

- [Ben] Chancellor Mark Fuller noticed this immediately when he got the university's top job four years ago.

- [Mark] Sometimes you'd walk down a hallway and there'd be a bucket, and when there was rain you know, that was catching water.

- [Ben] And there are other complications that come with maintaining Rudolph's mega structure.

David Gingerella is the head of facilities at the university.

- [David] All the stairs have a little bit of an overhang to them.

It's how he designed them.

Over a period of time they start cracking and sometimes the overhang cracks off a little bit.

- [Ben] And he says it's also hard to make these concrete structures energy efficient.

- On the inside of the buildings, we can't add insulation and then sheet rock over it because it loses the integrity of the building.

- [Ben] These challenges have left many institutions questioning whether it's even worth preserving brutalist architecture.

- They're all sort of kind of millstones around the next of these institutions that now steward these buildings.

- [Ben] Many of Rudolph's buildings have been demolished, including this one in North Carolina.

A housing project in Buffalo also met the wrecking ball, and so did Rudolph's own architectural office in Manhattan.

And while Rudolph's buildings at UMass Dartmouth are still standing, the university estimates it has about $660 million worth of maintenance needs.

- A lot of the things that have come due in terms of trying to maintain the campus have come forward at one time.

- In 2024, the university's maintenance consultant recommended gut renovation or demolition of many of the brutalist buildings.

Is this campus in danger of not securing the resources it needs to get over that big hump of maintenance problems coming in all at once?

- That's a good question.

And whether we're in danger of not getting them, I tend to be an optimist, I'll be honest with you.

- [Ben] The university plans to begin a renovation of Rudolph's liberal arts building this summer at a cost of almost $100 million.

Three other brutalist buildings on campus needs similar renovations, but the university hasn't secured the funding yet.

Chancellor Fuller says he's determined to get that done.

- 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.

You would have to drag me kicking and screaming out of here to let somebody demolish it.

I mean, we have conversations all the time about how to maintain the integrity of the campus.

- [Ben] At the end of the day, Fuller hopes people will see UMass Dartmouth as a national treasure of brutalist architecture.

- People need to just understand how distinctive this place is.

You'll never see another campus like this.

I don't believe ever.

Nobody's going to build this now, ever again.

So I think we have to maintain it, and I think that's the story we have to tell people.