The FedEx Global Education Center at University of North Carolina, designed by Leers Weinzapfel Associates and Pearce Brinkley Cease + Lee, revitalized the university’s international programs. (Photographs by Peter Aaron/Esto)

Montreal — The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill opened a global-education building last year that has helped to ground and unify the various international programs on campus, an administrator told a crowd at the Society for College and University Planning’s annual conference.

UNC has had aspirations for global education, but its international programs and departments were scattered and hidden all over the campus, said Raymond B. Farrow III, the executive director of the university’s Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the former director of development for international studies. The problem became apparent to Mr. Farrow when foreign dignitaries visiting the university had to be shuttled from building to building all day long.

The university decided to build a central home for international studies to unify the programs, and for the site picked a parking lot on an odd-shaped intersection, situated amid venerable and mediocre buildings.

Mr. Farrow hoped that the university would hire Leers Weinzapfel Associates, the architects who had designed the University of Pennsylvania’s Gateway Complex, a chiller plant that is surrounded by a perforated metal screen through which visitors can see the plant’s guts, complete with colorful pipes.

But Mr. Farrow says that trustees at the university, which has beautiful traditional architecture, were skeptical about putting a modern building on the campus. Mr. Farrow organized a walking tour of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where trustees saw traditional buildings next to modern ones, such as Steven Holl’s Simmons Hall at MIT.

“We learned in our walking tours that good architecture — and bad architecture — is not defined by styles,” he says.

The resulting building, which opened last year, features red brick to blend with Carolina architecture, but also a green roof and a large glassy facade. It is oriented around a central atrium that provides for serendipitous meetings between students and faculty members and also offers ample space for banquets. Classrooms in the building are open not only to international programs, but also to programs like biology and philosophy that might benefit from the international atmosphere.

Interestingly, the building features special storage for a set of Indonesian instruments called a gamelan.