A Flexible Approach to Student Housing Collaboration Space

The recent focus on office to residential conversion gets me thinking about the idea of typological specificity and the subsequent need for conversion. Why don’t we build in a way that inherently allows for flexible use? The AEC community often references planning and building code requirements that drive decisions based on planned use, but I’d argue that it really comes down to cost and efficiency. To make projects pencil, we create buildings that facilitate the intended use case as efficiently as possible. While this efficiency likely saves on first cost, it increases the cost of future flexibility as needs change, resulting in added complexity and waste to change the use of our built infrastructure.

With my current focus on developing high performance demountable interior systems, I’m interested in identifying where real opportunities exist to create flexible space that can leverage this type of system. What typologies demand space that must evolve over time? One use case that seems particularly interesting when discussing flexibility is student housing. University campuses provide a microcosm of diverse typological intersections (classroom, laboratory, food service, athletics, workplace, housing, etc.) packed into a relatively small footprint under (basically) single ownership. There are numerous moments of blurred boundaries that allow for interesting thought experiments in flexibility, with the intersection of study and collaboration space within student housing providing a particularly compelling imperative to build in a high performance, but also flexible manner.

KOVA is currently engaged as a Civic Partner with Minerva University students to study this question: "How might we reimagine space to enhance college students' activities and experience in post-traditional learning environments?" The intent of the question is not to presuppose a “student housing” or “academic building” typology. If you table the discussion around the role of the physical campus for the moment, we want to understand what spaces students really need to achieve their learning and social growth goals. Minerva’s cohort of world traveling, “campus-less” students provides a great test case for what spaces are truly required to support a great academic experience.

The "best" study space can be debated, so let’s come at it from the housing side, starting with the assumption that student housing is a good idea. Every student needs a place to sleep and that there is social benefit to being co-located with other students. One interesting place to look for historical context is the long and complex history of University student housing (Carla Yanni’s Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory is a great read if you really want to dig deep). These facilities have evolved from the original purpose of distancing students from outside “corrupting” influences, to the current role as “an integral part of the educational pathway,” providing an affordable, safe, and accessible place for students to learn, socialize, and sleep. As a response to the post World War II modernist “pack in the beds” dormitories, projects like UCSC’s Kresge College were the first attempts to create multifunctional residential communities, envisioning a space for learning and socializing that belongs closer to the students’ home than their classroom. 

This space has continued to evolve, taking various names like study rooms, flex space, or collaboration space, but it's often a tangential program that could really pivot to playing a more central role in future flexible learning environments. What should this space in between really look like? A place where students spend their time between class and sleep to complete assignments, do research, or just think? How should design this space to help increase flexibility in University building stock?

This article from Student Housing Business last year provides an interesting look at current approaches to student housing amenities and multifunctional spaces through the lens of a number of recent projects. Paraphrasing the takeaways in the “Alone, Together” section, we can distill some key attributes of successful student housing/academic hybrid spaces:

• Choice: Provide choices for learning and study settings to keep the experience fresh and interesting.
• Flexibility: Accommodate a multitude of uses from private study to group social events.
• Convenience: Create distributed spaces that supplement centralized amenity spaces to increase variety and choice.
• Connection: Give students control over their privacy (visual / acoustic) to allow for varied levels of connection during focused work.

At the core, these spaces are about providing students with added capabilities (technology, privacy, etc.), while also contributing to a sense of belonging. It's important to remember that Choice, Flexibility, Convenience, and Connection are concepts that continue to evolve over time. While today’s solutions may satisfy today’s definitions, these spaces will need to be flexible to be viable in the longer term without either becoming quickly outdated or requiring a constant cycle of renovation. Instead of designing these collaboration spaces to accommodate hypothetical future student needs, let's design them to perform optimally now and build them in a way that is physically flexible for the future.