Breuer was one of the central figures of the Bauhaus School in Germany in the 1920s but fled to London, and then the United States during the rise of the Nazi Party. He is best known for his later works of Brutalist architecture - aggressive, concrete sculptural projects. His most famous project, completed just as he began designing the Campus Center, is the Whitney Museum of Art (1966) now referred to as The Met Breuer. For the Campus Center project, and most of his other significant buildings in the 1950s and '60s, Breuer worked closely with his partner, Herbert Beckard.

The interior of the building has seen ongoing renovations to meet the demands of the university. This was an attempt to improve the aesthetic of the dining hall/food commons and the hotel spaces, which ultimately changed Bruer's original design concept in many places throughout.

The campus center is an eleven-story multiuse behemoth. Several stories underground are meeting rooms; the offices of the Daily Collegian, the campus newspaper; other student organizations, and a spectacular, cavelike auditorium for major events. On the concourse level is a bustling hall including the University Store and restaurants. The tower consists of 116 hotel guest rooms, 36 conference meeting rooms, administrative offices, and at the top, the Marriott Center for Hospitality Management, part of the Isenberg School of Management. Visitors can enter the building directly from the parking garage through the underground passageway, and the complex is intentionally connected o the lowest level of the Student Union, a building that quickly outgrew its capacities in the 1960s and 1970s. 

The building is an overall good condition with varying levels of noticeable concrete maintenance issues on the exterior that will need to be addressed in the coming years. 

Some of the Campus Center's best attributes are the views it affords of the campus and the whole region. Looking out various directions, you can see church spires of the town and college, as well as mountain ranges off in the distance such as Mt. Greylock, and Mt. Monadnock in southern New Hampshire.

Breuer's design successfully framed Metawampe Lawn to the south of the building and east of the Student Union. It remains a popular place for outdoor gatherings and other campus events. But the most striking, and for many, the least successful gesture was to raise the visible part of the building up onto a platform, dozens of steps up from the lawn. the tower of the campus center now floats above a broad expanse. The plaza on the north side of the building is interrupted by pyramidal skylights designed to admit light to the cavernous concourse and ballroom levels below. And the huge wall of glass in the hotel lobby is an impressive sight, sandwiched as it is between the broad concrete plaza and nine floors of the weightly building above. But the plaza itself remains an underused, often windswept space.

An especially intriguing part of the Campus Center design is the parking garage, which continues the grid theme of the Campus Center and makes for an unexpectedly grand backdrop to the eastern entrance to the Campus Center concourse. The light shining through the concrete grid screen enlivens an otherwise mundane arrival sequence.

The building itself deserves a closer look to appreciate its complexity. Breuer made what could have been a simple rectangular block of a building into a proud piece of sculpture. The nine-story stairwells on both ends break up the rigidity of a rectilinear facade, and the use of multiple fenestration patterns employed to distinguish the different uses-hotel, meeting, and conference rooms-make for a lively public face, especially on the less frequently seen north-facing side. Huge floor slabs are marked with lines so that floors and functions are made obvious.

The campus center did not fare well among critics when it opened. Jane Holtz Kay, writing in the Boston Globe, called it a "honeycomb fortress...on stilts." Campus magazines jokingly asked, "Waffles, anyone?" in reference to the grid of concrete openings.

At one point in time, an interior courtyard contained two works of public art: Jonathan Kohrman's 1989 outdoor mural Civility, an acrylic on plyboard work that aims to promote the "goals of the university community to live and work together with cooperation, enthusiasm and joy", alongside ceramicist and sculptor Brenda Minisci's 1971 fiberglass fountain piece Fiore Verdi (a gift of the Class of 1970). The mural emerged from a design competition launched by the departments of Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning, Afro-American Studies, and Art; UMass student modeled for the work, which as a panel at the installation explains, "portrays enrichment through participation in a multiculturally diverse University."

The Center is named for alumnus Murray D. Lincoln, a national leader in consumer and producer cooperatives and found and president of CARE from 1945 to '57. 

Miller, M. R., Page, M. (2013). University of Massachusetts Amherst: An architectural tour.