Selected in an architectural competition, the McAllen facility, elegantly sheathed in light red brick and concrete solar screens, is less extended and more tightly knit than that of its earlier counterpart, the Fort Brown Memorial Center in Brownsville (see BS1). While both offer a sequenced interplay of interior and exterior spaces, the one in McAllen provides a linear arrangement of interior spaces—all with their own expressive roofs—linked by screened split-level courtyards that provide outdoor circulation, much in the same manner of the school campuses designed by Caudill Rowlett Scott (
MR12). The thin, carefully detailed exposed I-beam structure denotes the modernist influence of Mies van der Rohe.