Resources
Defining Concepts | Flexibility
As the old saying goes, the only thing constant is change. The same is true in a college residence hall. It may be a student changing modes from social time to private time. It may be changing a room alignment from one that serves students into one that serves visiting conference attendees. It may be changing a lobby into a classroom. This purposeful flexibility and the ability to reconfigure the building’s common public and quasi-public space for an assortment of uses will benefit the residents in a number of ways.
Adjustable Boundaries: At the discretion of the occupant, the individual room can be fully opened to the suite’s or pod’s common space or be fully closed off by a sliding wall, allowing students to have either privacy or group immersion at different times. The principle of flexibility allows individual students to achieve a degree of privacy, even in multiple-occupancy rooms. Two-person rooms should use offsets, asymmetrical arrangement of furniture, and other design features to break up line-of-sight and create a degree of privacy. At the same time, to nurture informal social and academic interchange throughout the day, the building should include small alcoves conducive to impromptu hallway conversations.
Stowable Furniture: To maximize the flexibility of space at the home level and compensate for high-density living, furniture could be designed to break down, fold, stow away, or disappear into the floor, walls, or ceiling at will. Designs may include provisions for the intensive displaying, using, and storing of the student’s personal property.
Modification of Space: Movable walls and modular furniture allow the building’s large public spaces to be quickly reconfigured to accommodate all manner of events including concerts, graduations, seminars, gallery displays, and celebrations or to be quickly converted into a series of smaller non-public spaces for temporary or permanent classrooms, offices, and small-group meeting areas.
Resident Identity: Selecting unique physical design features allows hall identities to reflect characteristics of the residents. For example, rooms and halls can be modified to suit new students, married students, resident faculty, older lifelong learners, resident elders, or international, ethnic, gender, or disability identity groups as well as behavioral affinity groups such as quiet students or nonsmokers or groups identified by academic level or field of study.
Accessibility: Colleges and universities of the future enroll a vast diversity of students, including people with a wide variety of disabilities. Subtly accommodating a wide range of differently abled people, the residence hall is comfortably accessible to all because it is well designed. Most importantly, the accommodation designs are for everyone’s use, not afterthoughts that separate out people with disabilities.
Defining Concepts | Flexibility
As the old saying goes, the only thing constant is change. The same is true in a college residence hall. It may be a student changing modes from social time to private time. It may be changing a room alignment from one that serves students into one that serves visiting conference attendees. It may be changing a lobby into a classroom. This purposeful flexibility and the ability to reconfigure the building’s common public and quasi-public space for an assortment of uses will benefit the residents in a number of ways.
Adjustable Boundaries: At the discretion of the occupant, the individual room can be fully opened to the suite’s or pod’s common space or be fully closed off by a sliding wall, allowing students to have either privacy or group immersion at different times. The principle of flexibility allows individual students to achieve a degree of privacy, even in multiple-occupancy rooms. Two-person rooms should use offsets, asymmetrical arrangement of furniture, and other design features to break up line-of-sight and create a degree of privacy. At the same time, to nurture informal social and academic interchange throughout the day, the building should include small alcoves conducive to impromptu hallway conversations.
Stowable Furniture: To maximize the flexibility of space at the home level and compensate for high-density living, furniture could be designed to break down, fold, stow away, or disappear into the floor, walls, or ceiling at will. Designs may include provisions for the intensive displaying, using, and storing of the student’s personal property.
Modification of Space: Movable walls and modular furniture allow the building’s large public spaces to be quickly reconfigured to accommodate all manner of events including concerts, graduations, seminars, gallery displays, and celebrations or to be quickly converted into a series of smaller non-public spaces for temporary or permanent classrooms, offices, and small-group meeting areas.
Resident Identity: Selecting unique physical design features allows hall identities to reflect characteristics of the residents. For example, rooms and halls can be modified to suit new students, married students, resident faculty, older lifelong learners, resident elders, or international, ethnic, gender, or disability identity groups as well as behavioral affinity groups such as quiet students or nonsmokers or groups identified by academic level or field of study.
Accessibility: Colleges and universities of the future enroll a vast diversity of students, including people with a wide variety of disabilities. Subtly accommodating a wide range of differently abled people, the residence hall is comfortably accessible to all because it is well designed. Most importantly, the accommodation designs are for everyone’s use, not afterthoughts that separate out people with disabilities.
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