The Fine Arts Center was designed at the time when the whole master plan was being developed to provide an interior pedestrian-scaled campus and an exterior vehicular-access perimeter.

The location for the fine arts building provided an opportunity to bound the area of encroachment permitted the automobile and to connect the two sides of the campus, the sciences and the liberal arts, encouraging the students to walk through this building and become aware of its activities and coming events in their normal course of movement through the campus. The building is stretched across the entire front of the inner campus forming a gateway and, by elevating the art studios, an arcade of open book piers.

The complex has two scales: one, the super scale of the entry side; the other, a smaller scale, more appropriate to pedestrian movement on the campus side. The super scale is made up of a series of planes at right angles in plan and normal and sloping to the vertical plane in section so that as the sun passes over the south surface of the building, a series of strong geometrical shadows are developed on the dihedral columns in the foreground and beyond on the layers of surfaces in the middle and background, making the building lively and interesting and very powerful in its expression.

On the north side, which leads to the central pond at the heart of the campus, the forms are developed differently so they will catch some of the early and late sun.