UO DeNorval Unthank Jr. Hall
AIA Eugene People's Choice Award
Oregon Excellence in Concrete Award
Interior Design Commercial Cafeteria Honoree - PNW Public Market
LEED Gold certified
In collaboration with Mithūn.
DeNorval Unthank Jr. Hall is phase one of the Hamilton Walton Transformation Project, a three-phase, three-building student residence hall and student life project. The University challenged the project team to design and deliver a project that could compete with market-rate student housing to keep access to education equitable and affordable. DeNorval Unthank Jr. Hall is dedicated to honor the University’s first Black architecture graduate.
Unthank Hall will influence many students’ and parents’ first impressions of the campus and University as a whole. The first floor is home to the university’s prospective student welcome center, designed to showcase the very best the University of Oregon has to offer its incoming Ducks. This center has display spaces, model residence hall rooms, meeting spaces, and a large presentation room. It also serves as the headquarters for tour guides and a starting point for campus tours.
The first floor also attracts students and visitors through its flagship market hall. Encompassing nine food venues, a range of seating areas, and multiple art installations from local artists, the Pacific Northwest Market is open, layered, and well-lit. Ingredients are locally sourced from more than 25 farms in the surrounding Willamette Valley.
The upper residential floors accommodate 695 student beds in single, double, and triple units. The building’s arms extend from a common circulation core and shared lounges, promoting social connection. At the end of each arm are shared study rooms with expansive views of campus and the topography surrounding Eugene. In order to lighten the massing of this 208,000-sf building, metal-clad volumes, brick massing, and cantilevering punctuate the overall massing. A staggered and graded pattern of metal panels reflects the sky and brings interest to the upper faces of the buildings.
Unthank Hall works in conjunction with the other two residential halls—Yasui Hall and the (as yet unnamed) New Residential Hall—in the overall Hamilton Walton Transformation project. The buildings draw from the tradition of brick on campus, introducing bond patterns that create a vertical gradient from dark to light, and a gradient across the three buildings, from earth tones in the east to more traditional red tones nearing main campus to the west.
