Collectively known as Regents Towers, the two 9-story towers were planned at the same time but constructed sequentially. The lowrise building that connects the two by walkways at the upper campus level is called Brunsdale Lounge, constructed about the same time. The towers are “carved out of the bluff” that separates the upper from lower campuses. The foundation is low on the bluff and the residential floors rise up above the bluff to become a prominent part of the upper campus. Pedestrian walkways or bridges at the 4th and 5th floors connect to the upper campus, while elevators vertically link the floors.The Towers have a reinforced concrete frame and are clad in red brick trimmed with a light-colored masonry. The three buildings are free-standing and only attached to one another by pedestrian walkways.

Given these buildings’ dates, it is difficult to know who did the actual design. In a 1965 newspaper article, Roger Olson is identified as “representing the architects.” In his Feb. 23, 1978 Decorah newspaper Red Book Notes on the occasion of Altfillisch’s death, though, Bill Hart writes this:

New dormitories came up for consideration, and Altfillisch was again called in for conference. The college authorities wanted to build these new buildings east, across old Highway 52. Charles fought to have them built in their present locations, hanging on the north edges of the bluff and much closer to the center of the other buildings on the campus. These two north dormitories are master pieces of architecture, not to be found on any other college campus.

This is a concrete block Ranch-style building clad in a red-brick veneer. The brick is bonded with bright white mortar. It sits across a service road from the Korsrud heating plant on a slope so the lower level that faces Korsrud is exposed. Three overhead doors on that lower level open into a garage area. A fourth overhead door on the upper level is either a part of a very early addition or in an original wing. The overall roofline is hipped with the wing’s roofline also hipped but much shallower. The rear roof of the building ends in a gable. The upper floor was planned in 1965 mostly as storage space with restrooms and an office in one corner. The wing, which seamlessly blends with the rest of the building, is devoted to a loading bay and likely provided more interior storage space. In 1993, the interior was renovated according to college archive records, but it is unknown if the windows were changed at this time. The building in its style and materials bridges the non-luther residential properties to the south with the Luther campus to the north. The records give Altfillisch’s name for this building, but the Luther College archives has a bill for services that identifies the hours of Roger Olson, Roy Nelson, and Jerry Aulwes, suggesting that architect Roger Olson was perhaps primarily responsible for the building design. Given Altfillisch’s retirement around 1963, this seems plausible.

This four-story building was built as a men’s dorm housing 256 students, but now is co-ed and for first-year students. It is named for J. Wilhelm Ylvisaker, the college’s fifth president who served from 1948 to 1961. It was the first of three dorms built to handle Luther’s explosive growth in the 1960s. Sixteen window replacements were installed in 2009, but the new ones closely approximate the originals. The style is streamline with minimal decoration. It has a reinforced concrete frame and is clad in red brick backed by concrete block. The design was by the firm of “Altfillisch, Olson, Gray and Thompson”; the engineer was Harold E. Rucks of Dubuque, and the general contractor was the Black Hawk Construction Co. of Waterloo. The Altfillisch firm architect who signed the July 13, 1963 letter requesting construction bids was Roger Olson, and a 1964 Decorah newspaper photo of the cornerstone laying describes Olson as the person who “designed the building.” The separate, one-story gathering space to the east is more distinctively styled than the main dormitory itself.

The Luther College Archives website includes the following background on the building’s construction:

Ylvisaker Hall needed to house the entire male freshman class when it was built. The design called for a long three story building which included large study and recreation lounges on the east end of the building. The person put in charge of the building was W.O. Kalsow, the previous chief financial officer, who became the assistant vice president of plant expansion. In the summer of 1964 there was a frantic rush to finish the dormitory before freshman move in day in the fall. In order to finish, Kalsow insisted the contractors work on Labor Day. Not surprisingly, a union representative showed up to encourage workers to walk off the job, but Kaslow ordered the man off the campus as a trespasser. Work continued until the end of the day. On the day that the freshmen moved in, faculty members were carrying the mattresses in alongside the freshmen students.

An eerie, color-enhanced photo of the Athletic Center–NOT indicating that the building is burning.

After the burning of Preus Gymnasium in 1961, the college commissioned a comprehensive college plan that would have placed a new gymnasium between Valders Hall of Science and the Decorah Municipal Pool. David T. Nelson, among others, strongly resisted this plan to force all of the required buildings into the confined space of the upper campus. After Nelson threatened to step away from being the college’s acting president if the campus were not expanded into the lower floodplain area, the Regents went against their earlier plan. This deeply upset the Physical Education department, who felt that they were being relegated to the fringes of the campus, away from its traditional central heart.

The new field house was completed in 1963 in a Midcentury Modern Streamline style. Because of the building’s location in the floodplain, the area had to be filled with hundreds of tons of rock and soil before construction could begin. The insurance payment for Preus Gymnasium covered almost the complete cost of the new field house. The major expansions and renovations of 1991 and 2014 have mostly obscured Altfillisch’s original design, although some elements are still visible.

The Centennial Union was named for the college’s 100th anniversary observed during the 1960-61 school year, though the entire building was not fully completed until 1973. In 2006, the Union was extensively remodeled and renamed the Bert M. and Mildred O. Dahl Centennial Union in recognition of the Dahl family’s project funding.

Designed with a Midcentury Modern approach that was primarily rectilinear and spare, the building’s masonry decoration was applied to the façade and evidenced through the organic undulations of its western roof line (both nonextant). The building takes advantage of its site at the crest of the bluff to appear low-rise from the east, or central campus, but actually is two to three stories tall on the west side and offers a remarkable river valley view. The 2006 remodeling project included a new east side façade. The opposite, west side of the building, was altered by at least 1986 with window replacements and a redesigned roof line. These alterations leave the original 1961 Altfillisch Midcentury Modern building with poor integrity, and it is therefore a noncontributing building in the Luther College Campus Historic District.

Named after a region in Norway as well as a town in Wisconsin, the L-shaped building currently houses the physics, environmental studies, nursing, and psychology departments. Classrooms, offices, function-specific rooms such as an advanced lab, as well as several lecture halls and a planetarium and storage areas, fill the building’s floors. It has the largest lecture hall on campus, seating about 300. Built of a reinforced concrete frame clad with red brick, the stairways are located at the ends of the two wings that form the ell, with the main entrance at the interior intersection of the two. Larger exterior wall expanses have a diamond pattern worked into the masonry. An attached greenhouse has been modified with solid walls and a newer greenhouse is attached. Overall, the smaller windows appear to be replacements, but larger expanses of glazing appear intact. Designed by the local firm of Altfillisch, Olson, Gray, and Thompson, the main entrance is a hallmark of Midcentury Modern design. Two-stories in height, tall brick piers separate the entrance into two bays of glass and white-metal (aluminum?) frames. The piers rise above the roof and terminate in a splayed geometric “capital” made of concrete or covered with a concrete-looking material. Flat canopies of white-metal shelter the entrances. Given its size and stylish 1960s design, Valders is a contributing resource to the historic campus district. At the time of the 2008 construction of Sampson-Hoffland Laboratories, much of the Valders interior was fully reconstructed. One lamentable loss, due to ADA and other safety requirements, was the elegant original parabola-shaped ramp in the central atrium connecting the second stories of the east and west wings. That atrium was in the 1960s and 1970s sometimes used for musical events because of its live acoustics. The distinctive 1980s planetarium wall art piece by Orville Running was preserved during the 2008 building reconstruction.

There doesn’t seem to be an entry for this bell holder in the complete Altfillisch firm Project List. But a May 7, 1956 A. R. Coffeen letter to the Luther Class of 1956 describes a Charles Altfillisch plan for the “Victory Bell” that included Winona stone, steel lintel support for the bell setting, a 2 ⅝” painted fir seat, and a concrete foundation, total cost not to exceed $1,095. This is very much like the bell holder that was installed, except that the bench is of cantilevered concrete. An early 2000s renovation replaced the original wood nameplate with a brass nameplate using the current College logo and added new copper flashing along the top.

There was an earlier bell, a gift from Luther students, hung in Main I from 1874. In 1898 1000 small replicas of that bell were struck from the metal saved during the 1889 fire that destroyed Main I. A new bell, donated by Bjorn Edwards of Chicago, was dedicated in 1890 and was placed in front of Main II, where students could ring it between hours. When Main II was destroyed by fire in 1942, the bell was mounted in front of Preus Gymnasium where it stood until the Gymnasium was burned in 1961. The new bell holder and setting was one of the college’s Centennial projects.

Named for the third college president, Oscar L. Olson, the building was constructed as a men’s dormitory serving 233 students in triple and double rooms. At the time of Olson Hall’s construction most men lived in private homes off campus. In 2004, the west wing was converted to two-bedroom suites. Today the dorm houses both men and women students, first-year students in one wing and older students in the other. The building has the streamline, mid-century lines of modernist architecture devoid of ornamentation. It was designed by Charles Altfillisch and Associates, with Johnson Construction of Winona, Minnesota as the general contractor.

The original dorm room windows were configured with four horizontal panels, and all cranked out. These windows were common in the 1950s but are also commonly replaced because they leak generous amounts of air. Around 1970, these windows were replaced by a three-part window of one fixed panel, one that opened, and one solid filler panel. The central block of the building continues to have its large plate glass panels. The top floor lounge, which protrudes slightly above the roof line, has larger fixed windows also. The building is constructed of concrete block clad with red face-brick. The siting is notable as the building is positioned slightly downhill from the street, necessitating pedestrian bridges to cross from the sidewalk to the entrances, which are covered by flat canopies supported by brick walls with decorative voids that lack bricks. After documenting much of the information in these paragraphs, consultant Jan Olive Full concluded her comments with this summary:  “While the window replacements diminish the integrity of the building, the size, scale, and styling remain intact and allow the building to contribute to the Luther College Campus Historic District.”