Talking Stick - May/June 2011 - 67

CONTINUED

Starting from Scratch

community. In addition to academic spaces, the Rutgers project will be home to a bookstore, movie theaters, dining facilities, and cafés. Montclair will have a new dining hall and two large multipurpose rooms open to the entire student population.

open to all students. Everyone must pass through these areas to get to the various elevators. Architecturally, this allows flexibility in the geometry, size, and height of the common spaces that are more typically placed underneath double-loaded corridor buildings. Karen L. Pennington, vice president of student development and campus life at Montclair, notes that the design of their project (dubbed “The Heights”) promotes the kind of interaction that itself becomes a learning experience: “Today’s technology often allows students to connect more through non face-to-face activities than through personal and physical interaction. The hub concept designed in The Heights will be instrumental to connecting students among different learning communities while allowing for cross ‘pollination’ of academic, social, and cultural programs. It will bring students together in a central core that allows them the flexibility of collaborating with those in other programs without ever leaving the comforts of home!”

prevalent in much student housing today and is much more conducive to social learning. It also provides unique opportunities, since these various components and activities are expressed visibly through the façade.

Building Community
It is important that each student feels part of a smaller community they can call their own. One way to accomplish this is by breaking down the scale of each building into a series of workable communities. For larger residence halls, an ideal community would be 30-40 students, with a resident assistant centrally located within the community, on one floor of a residential wing. And while that group should have its own social space near their rooms, that space can also be shared with other communities and is in fact where efficiencies can be made. This notion of shared territory is essential to the successful activation of all the areas we have talked about, from the scale of the room to the building to the spaces between buildings and the greater campus.

Design Elements for Living And Learning
Design elements can be used in deliberate ways to enrich students’ living and learning experiences by activating student life, nurturing academics, encouraging socialization, and building community.

Activating Student Life
Several key design aspects can be employed to exploit the density and overlapping uses of these projects to enrich and activate student life in ways that conventional housing fails to do. The sheer scale and number of beds involved in these projects require and justify a large amount of learning and social space, dining options, and, in some cases, retail components. Placement of these elements within the buildings should accommodate not only the residents but also the learning community as a whole.

Encouraging Socialization
The possibilities for learning expand in this type of environment, particularly in terms of allowing more opportunities for socialization, and placement and articulation of a building’s common space can have a profound impact on the success of these projects. At Rutgers there were two major considerations for breathing new life into this new campus community. First was the decision to “float” all the student residences above the first floor. The ground level is completely dedicated to amenities, teaching and study space, and a movie theater that doubles as a lecture hall. It is also fully glazed in order to make a strong connection to the outdoors. Second was the decision to provide a variety of unique study spaces and social lounges throughout the buildings, on different levels, overlapping and shared between floors. This is a departure from the same-size, same-orientation, and stacked organization that is

A Catalyst for Future Development
By ensuring that all the key design considerations of their new residential communities have been addressed, Rutgers and Montclair are confident that their new residence halls will be a catalyst for campus development and student learning. By applying sound urban design and town planning principles, while simultaneously addressing the expectations of today’s students, they have positioned their universities to attract and retain the best students. Student housing officials working within this framework, in collaboration with campus planners and architects, have a unique opportunity to further 21st-century education through enhanced residence life. TS
Luis Bernardo
is Principal and Partner at Design Collective, Inc. MAY + JUNE 2011

Nurturing Academics
The sharing of knowledge can be encouraged by incorporating spaces that accommodate groups of various sizes. These spaces should be positioned in such a way that they are highly visible and serve as a hub at the center of several communities. Nurturing academics can also be accomplished by providing ample glazing and different levels of openness for different types of study and by encouraging faculty/student interaction with dedicated faculty offices near staff management. The buildings at Montclair achieve these goals by concentrating all these amenities at a hub, a central space that joins all the residential wings and is

Talking Stick - May/June 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Talking Stick - May/June 2011