Improve Student Life by Designing for the Community

Interior and exterior views of student apartments at Oklahoma State University.

University housing that’s designed to emphasize community can support and enhance a student’s everyday life.

Connections to community are made within the housing facility as well as with the surrounding campus, and these links nurture the social skills necessary for young adults to function successfully in their maturing world.

Administrators and educators can help strengthen students’ connections through design strategies including corridors, community spaces, and campus location. Here’s how.

Design Strategies: Corridors

• Consider widening residence hallways to eight feet or more to create community spaces.
• Provide windows along or at the end of a corridor to make it more pleasant.
• Detail the corridor with pilasters or column motifs, attractive wall color, ambient lighting, and other accents.
• Locate resident doors across the hall from each other.
• Design the divisions of the building to accommodate no more than 35-40 students per wing.
• Provide convenient vertical stair circulation to promote circulation between the floors, discouraging use of elevators. Widened, open stairways are more attractive and appealing to use.
• Promote circulation that directs residents to, through, or adjacent, to the main community space.

Community is better created by everyday patterns in people’s lives. In student housing, hallways naturally offer a linear community space in which to sit and play cards or visit with students passing through. These are the kinds of spaces that come alive and nurture a sense of community-even when a building is not specifically designed to do so.

Today, residence housing design has largely moved away from including a giant community space, instead offering more informal waiting spaces. Even though circulation space does not produce revenue, strictly limiting corridor width to code can eliminate a good opportunity. By widening corridors only two feet and locating doors on either side, the hallway can become a great place for conversation.

Design Strategies: Community Spaces

• In double-loaded corridor buildings, centrally locate the main community space near the main entrance.
• Provide means to open the space to an outside terrace during favorable weather.
• Provide ample volume, glazing, and light.
• Stand-alone community spaces should be centrally located to surrounding apartments.
• Consider adding amenities such as small resident kitchens, a study area, media rooms, mailrooms, within or adjacent to the main community space.

There are new ways to present more formal community spaces. They should be as central as possible and placed close to vertical circulation. Community spaces should be unavoidable, in a sense, so that everyone must pass through in order to circulate into the building.

Bistro-type coffee areas, bagel shops, and pizza stands are appealing amenities to include in these spaces. Even a laundry area can force a little bit of community into common spaces.

An approach for a four-story building, for example, is to design one large two-story community space serving the first and second floors and another two-story space serving the third and fourth floors. This setup gives everybody a common gathering area, but maintains the recommended range of 35 to 50 students per community space.

Design Strategies: Campus Location

• Choosing a site close to the core of any campus is desirable, but selecting an undeveloped or unlinked site within the campus can help create a new, vibrant anchor for student growth, activities, and community.
• Student housing within the campus can achieve a sense of community by arranging the buildings to create nodes of shared community spaces, giving students places to "hang-out."
• Locate remote housing developments close to university system mass transit and/or create a transit stop.
• Provide additional site amenities for remote housing developments as well as ample parking (1:1) ratio.

In working with university housing, the building blocks of community go from dorm room, to floor, to housing wing, to hall and finally to the circle of outside, intersecting communities. Relating student housing to its campus requires clear pathways and strong linkages.

The best model is an urban one, allowing housing to be an important part of the 24/7 life of the campus, rather than being segregated from classrooms. When housing and academic buildings are placed in close proximity to one another, students don’t have to worry about lingering at the student union or library at night because they are not far from their housing.

When university master plans place student housing closer to the academic core, the sheer migration of people can provide an ongoing source for community. Pedestrian pathways need to be created as more than just sidewalks. They can be enhanced by offering attractive places to linger and interact.

The challenge for university administrators is in finding ways to centrally locate housing within a mature, established campus. Some universities too often overlook potential sites in the inner campus, instead choosing vacant land at the campus edge. Sometimes a solution like limiting the amount of parking space can allow housing to be placed on a central site that initially seemed unacceptable.

Renovating and restoring older buildings also offers valuable student housing opportunities within the campus core and on choice pieces of real estate. A building may be 70 years old, but with renovation ranging from functional to cosmetic, the building can be given new life.

To encourage community in these older buildings, some student rooms might be removed to create community spaces or to allow wider spaces in the circulation pathways. While this plan may at first appear to be less efficient, it can ultimately help the building return to new life and build a sense of community.

Certain buildings may have a history that needs to be preserved, as well. An honors dorm or a Spanish immersion wing may have been tagged for years and hold a certain mystique. As with all existing housing, it is important to maintain the style and integrity of the buildings, while facilitating today’s lifestyles.

In creating new housing, universities need to carefully assess the land they do have and not necessarily settle for selecting the easy site. If a university is intent on strengthening the sense of community, it must place housing as part of the core campus, much like the old models of Cambridge and Oxford.

When housing is separated from the core, students are displaced and relegated to a distant area. The result is that a student’s academic life and social life become separate, and community is weakened.

In recent years, universities have seen a migration of students moving off campus to find more attractive housing built by private developers. As a result, universities have lost revenue or are only breaking even.
Today, new buildings can be more wisely constructed for a 30-year term rather than the older approach of building for 50 or even 75 years. In housing-especially-universities need to plan for ultimate flexibility.

David Demarest, NCARB, is principal at Demarest Associates in Dallas. He can be reached at (214) 748-6655 or ddemarest@demarch.com.