The student room
September 6th, 2013
In response to:- Do student housing standards need an overhaul? from Building Design online.
A well lit student room – Fitzwilliam Cambridge
In case you haven’t read or are not able to read the article it is an exchange between Michael Chessum President of University of London Union and Dav Bansal Director at Glenn Howells Architects in response to the question in the link above.
This is my response based on the experience of living for three years as a student at a technical college.
“It is not all about the bedrooms. There is now more focus on living and communal areas to encourage interaction and foster community values, evident in many recent schemes.” – says Dav Bansal of Glenn Howells architects.
The use of the word bedrooms illustrates the architects’ misunderstanding about the use of student rooms, or perhaps deliberate attempt to fulfil the commercial requirements of the University rather than the needs of the students who live in them.
On reading the above exchange I began to wonder if Dav Bansal had ever spent any time in a college or University and experienced student life, because reducing the role of a student room to that of a bedroom does not tally with anything I experienced in three years at a technical college.
A student room (not simply bedroom) is the displaced family room, a home away from home, and this applies whether the student has come directly from home or is a mature student. It has to fulfil many functions not simply that of somewhere to sleep.
It provides firstly a place to store belongings securely behind a locked door, clothes, study materials, personal possessions. Secondly it provides a place to sleep. Thirdly a place of private study which necessarily requires sufficient daylight for reading without artificial light when possible. Fourthly a place to invite other students for a private get together.
This last is very important and utterly different from “encourage interaction and foster community values” which is an attempt to design in something that happens naturally given the right environment.
The need for private space for socialising is to allow ideas to be tried out and to develop in private without being overheard and shot down by ignorant others and to make friends among the shy, for not all are extroverts.
“Don’t let the noise of other peoples opinions drown out your inner voice – Steve Jobs”
In addition a student room is, or should be, a place of retreat. Somewhere to feel secure away from the madding crowd, not just at night. Somewhere to gather ones thoughts and reflect on the day’s events and activities.
It is in summary far more than just a bedroom and it is this above all that Dav Bansal appears to have forgotten, and more worryingly looks to be the new standard by which future student accommodation is likely to be designed.
Postscript: It seems to me a retrograde step that the design of student rooms is now driven by the need to let them for conferences for ten weeks a year, when the students will need a basic room they can afford for over thirty weeks a year in most cases.
The commercialisation of University life, the removal of mandatory and discretionary grants, the introduction of tuition fees, and the introduction of the “hotel student bedroom with en-suite”, is changing the quality of life in a way that is not in the best interests of future students, in my opinion.
Further reading:-
Owen Hatherley – Quill private student housing
The Robbins Report 1963
28. Finally there is a function that is more difficult to describe concisely, but that is none the less fundamental: the transmission of a common culture and common standards of citizenship.
By this we do not mean the forcing of all individuality into a common mould: that would be the negation of higher education as we conceive it.
But we believe that it is a proper function of higher education, as of education in schools, to provide in partnership with the family that background of culture and social habit upon which a healthy society depends.
This function, important at all times, is perhaps especially important in an age that has set for itself the ideal of equality of opportunity.
It is not merely by providing places for students from all classes that this ideal will be achieved, but also by providing, in the atmosphere of the institutions in which the students live and work, influences that in some measure compensate for any inequalities of home background.
These influences are not limited to the student population. Universities and colleges have an important role to play in the general cultural life of the communities in which they are situated.
Comments taken from the Guardian which throw additional light on the situation.
They are designed to appeal to conference guests during holidays too
Now we know what’s driving this and it isn’t the students who want cheap not luxury accommodation.
If nobody wants to go there outside term time, you have the rooms lying empty for half the year. If the universities can fill them, they can use that money to keep rents reasonable for students. What you have is a cost of building and maintaining the halls and this has to be paid by someone. If you keep it cheap and crappy, it falls 100% on the students. If you make it more acceptable, the building and maintenance costs are higher, but the students pay well under 100% of that.
Most students want a balance – they want a fair price, but they don’t want to be living in squalor.
You use the word “luxury”, but that isn’t the right term here at all. The people being attracted to holiday conferences are people like visiting academics and companies doing awaydays for junior managers or sales staff. The universities are competing with the likes of Travelodge and Premier Inn – not the Ritz. They are filling the halls with conference guests who are looking for an acceptable, not fancy, place to stay.
I’ve been wondering why my generation was happy to share facilities where today’s generation “want” en-suites and suspect they don’t and would happily pay less for accommodation without en-suites but increasingly don’t have the choice. That’s what bothers me. I don’t believe people have changed that much in 30 years that they are no longer prepared to share showers and toilets but I can well understand the arguments for using the rooms all the year round. It’s just that on that basis no more student accommodation with shared facilities will ever be built and I think that’s a bad thing because it denies the students lower cost accommodation in the long term.
Also the en-suites take floor space out of the rooms, although Ash Court is an exception owing to the large room sizes anyway but from what I’ve seen of other plans I think Cambridge is an exception.
What utter tosh.
For the great majority of the time the accommodation will be occupied by students. It’s only during the summer months when the rooms will be free for other use, and even then it won’t be all of them.
Student accommodation has changed over the years. Even the halls of residence I stayed during my first year at university was transformed within the space of a few years – the TV room and the bar area both got satellite TV and other significant upgrades – and that was in the 1990s. Today the same accommodation is almost unrecognisable.
Quite right utter tosh. So now that I’ve got your attention and given that I’m not in a position to know would you please tell me whether you personally would prefer to pay more for a large room with an en-suite or less for a plain room with shared facilities? Thank you, this is a sincere question.
For example, broadband connections in every room and wifi throughout, whiteboards and shelving for books. My accommodation 30-odd years ago had none of that (we considered ourselves fortunate that there was an on-site laundry room) but these days those sorts of things are standard in most university halls.
It’s not about en suite toilets and shower rooms (although such things existed even back in the 1990s, at Leeds for one) it’s about the sort of incremental upgrades that most kids these days can’t get by without.
Well, at least you admit that you’ve chosen an exception rather than the rule.
Cambridge is one of the few universities that will cover more than basic running costs during the summer months: most of the Hulls and Leicesters of the world will find most of their rooms empty for most of the summer.
Also, you’ve vastly exaggerated how much of the time the rooms are going to be available during the year. Yes, the academic term has breaks in the winter and spring too but during those times the rooms will either be partly occupied by students who choose not to return home (or who choose to do so but who still rent out their rooms so they don’t have to move everything out just to move it back in again a couple of weeks later) and the number of rooms let out to non-students at that time is minimal.
No offence but I would have thought that someone going to Cambridge would be able to see all that for themselves.
I’ve omitted three less relevant comments here, they’re on the Guardian website to read.
SingleAspect