An exploration of the architecture of dormitories that exposes
deeply held American beliefs about education, youth, and
citizenship Every fall on move-in day, parents tearfully bid
farewell to their beloved sons and daughters at college
dormitories: it is an age-old ritual. The residence hall has come
to mark the threshold between childhood and adulthood, housing
young people during a transformational time in their lives. Whether
a Gothic stone pile, a quaint Colonial box, or a concrete slab, the
dormitory is decidedly unhomelike, yet it takes center stage in the
dramatic arc of many American families. This richly illustrated
book examines the architecture of dormitories in the United States
from the eighteenth century to 1968, asking fundamental questions:
Why have American educators believed for so long that housing
students is essential to educating them? And how has architecture
validated that idea? Living on Campus is the first architectural
history of this critical building type. Grounded in extensive
archival research, Carla Yanni's study highlights the opinions of
architects, professors, and deans, and also includes the voices of
students. For centuries, academic leaders in the United States
asserted that on-campus living enhanced the moral character of
youth; that somewhat dubious claim nonetheless influenced the
design and planning of these ubiquitous yet often overlooked campus
buildings. Through nuanced architectural analysis and detailed
social history, Yanni offers unexpected glimpses into the past:
double-loaded corridors (which made surveillance easy but echoed
with noise), staircase plans (which prevented roughhousing but
offered no communal space), lavish lounges in women's halls
(intended to civilize male visitors), specially designed
upholstered benches for courting couples, mixed-gender saunas for
students in the radical 1960s, and lazy rivers for the twenty-first
century's stressed-out undergraduates. Against the backdrop of
sweeping societal changes, communal living endured because it
bolstered networking, if not studying. Housing policies often
enabled discrimination according to class, race, and gender,
despite the fact that deans envisioned the residence hall as a
democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity. Yanni focuses on
the dormitory as a place of exclusion as much as a site of
fellowship, and considers the uncertain future of residence halls
in the age of distance learning.
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