Kenneth Bentsen’s Pan American University: Regionalist Architecture and Identity in the Borderlands

Cultural identity is a complex issue for Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, whose “transnational” population derives its culture from both Mexico and the United States. Marginalized and underserved by state institutions, the region has had few opportunities to celebrate its cultural heritage in monumental civic architecture. This changed in the mid-1960s when the state directed its resources toward transforming a local community college into an academic and cultural institution of regional significance. The institution, known then as Pan American College, hired Kenneth Bentsen, a successful Houston architect, to create a master plan and design new buildings. The commission challenged Bentsen, who was born in the Rio Grande Valley, to create an identity for Pan American that suggested a modern, forward-looking institution, but one with deep roots in the region. He favored a modernist architectural language that would have been at home in any American city, but the unique cultural heritage of his birthplace demanded a different approach. As a result, his South Texas projects are remarkable for their strong sense of place. This article explores Bentsen’s engagement with regionalist architecture in the Rio Grande Valley and analyzes his work there. It argues that his creative synthesis of Mexican and Anglo vernacular precedents recognizes in architecture the blended nature of the cultural experience in the Rio Grande Valley—a place in which the architecture, like the people, is neither Mexican nor Anglo, traditional nor modern. It reinforces connections with place by drawing on familiar materials and traditions of building but interprets them abstractly, with an ambiguity that suggests the limitless possibilities of the future.