The architecture at the University of Texas at El Paso owes a lot to the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan.
Though it’s close enough to see Mexico over the border and 80 percent of the student body have Mexican roots, the campus looks more like something you’d see in the Himalayas.
Every single building on the 366-acre campus, from the guard shacks to the parking garage to the library, resemble the architecture of Bhutan — a trippy agglomeration of sloping roofs and inset windows, punctuated with mosaic mandalas.
That article appeared in the April 1914 issue, and it included the first photographs ever published from Bhutan. The dean's wife apparently looked at the pictures and thought that El Paso’s Franklin Mountains looked kind of Himalayan.
“She said, ‘Wow. This reminds me a lot of Bhutan. You know what hubby? Why don’t we have the Bhutanese architecture here for UTEP?” Dominquez say. So the university set about creating a little Bhutan on the Texas-Mexico border. And now it has a piece of Bhutanese architecture actually crafted by Bhutanese.