The school has several buildings of importance in the modernist style, including the campus center designed by Marcel Breuer, the Southwest Residential Area designed by Hugh Stubbins Jr of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, The Fine Arts Center by Kevin Roche, the W.E.B. DuBois Library by Edward Durell Stone and the Mullins Center by Gordon Bunshaft.
Situated at the north end of the campus pond, the Murray D. Lincoln Campus Center is a widely noted example of Brutalist architecture: a poured concrete structure poised on a monumental platform, accessed by a series of broad steps. In keeping with his modernist principles, Marcel Breuer designed the facade of the building to articulate its varied functions: the recessed fenestration of the four hotel floors clearly differentiates them from the lower two floors, floors eight and nine are distinguished by a still different pattern of windows, while the top two floors are provided with sun screens that form distinctive patterns on the facade. Function is similarly expressed in the north facade and the end of the building, which have clearly articulated stair towers.
The Campus Center was conceived to be used in conjunction with the previously existing Student Union Building, to which it connects by an underground passage.