And in that pedagogical spirit, a new 35,300-square-foot (3,280-square-meter) building for the civil engineering program at the University of Minnesota Duluth is designed to teach students about materials, how they go together, how they age, and how they express the forces inherent in any structure.

"We started by asking, 'What do they need to learn as engineers, and what forces do they need to control?'" says architect Carol Ross Barney of Chicago, who designed the Swenson Civil Engineering Building. The associate architect was SJA Architects of Duluth.

Civil engineers design infrastructure to move water, to move traffic, to hold back the earth, to span long distances. In the northeastern part of Minnesota, including Duluth, civil engineers are particularly occupied with mining in the state's Iron Range, where iron ore is extracted. These aspects of professional focus and the special features of this region led Barney to design an engineering building that couldn't be anywhere else, for any other discipline.   >>>