Student Chris Flynn has spent many late nights working on his designs at the School of Architecture and Planning.
Flynn sits behind a desk piled high with the papers, building plans and tools he needs for his assignments.
As an architecture student, Flynn has 24-hour access to George Pearl Hall, and he needs it. Most architecture students do, he said.
Flynn said the building has its advantages.
"It is a lot more of a community learning now that we are here," he said.
Architect Antoine Predock said George Pearl Hall was built to reflect the landscape of New Mexico and the history of its people, and to nurture the promise of tomorrow's ingenuity.
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The building was built as a tribute to Route 66 and to the architecture of New Mexico's American Indians, he said.
"Architecture needs to respond to place in a really specific way, and each place is different," he said.
Predock said an architect's first responsibility is to enhance the area around the building. Students should view their roles as a chance to better a community by enhancing its landscape, he said.
"Globalization is like a buzzword, but with architecture, what globalization generally does is transplant a Western model to a third-world country. I think that is so dead wrong," he said. "It is key that architects first honor the place and honor the people and not just bring some building and plop it down not using architecture to enrich life."
Predock said George Pearl Hall was not only designed to compliment UNM, it was also built to foster the creativity of its students.
"The building has a major structural purpose in terms of its composition," he said. "So when a student enters the building, everything is exposed. Everything about the building is raw, just exactly as it was constructed, so students can look around the building and learn. They are learning about it for their daily lives."
Graduate student Kristina Guist said students never had the advantage of communicating with architecture students of a different discipline in the past.
"It really enforces the multi-discipline reality that landscape and architecture really is," she said. "In the real world, one really does not work without the other. It creates awareness and respect for the other disciplines."
Roger Schluntz, dean of the department, said that before the building opened on Jan. 20, students in the department roamed the streets of Central Avenue.
"Since the creation of the school, we had been on the south side of Central Avenue in adapted business facilities the University had acquired and in three different buildings simultaneously," he said. "So for one, we never really felt we were truly a part of the University. And two, we didn't feel like we had a real identity. Three, we felt like there was really no sense of community."
Schluntz said that when the time came to design a building to house the department, there was a long list of criteria the structure had to meet.
"We told all of the architects that we wanted a building that would be very open and by its design would help inform all the users, faculty and students about the activities of the other users," he said. "We wanted a building that, in itself, would teach."
The building had to emphasize the values of structural and mechanical space taught by the department, Schluntz said.
"The essence is really the power of design to support and improve expected human functions," he said. "The building responds to how we teach and how students learn - how staff and faculty work together."
