By Josh Gana and Kurt Haapala
Imagine you’re an up-and-coming housing professional. Perhaps you’ve spent the first years of your career living and working in a residence hall. During this time, you’ve seen first hand how students navigate the campus, interact with their environment, and build community with others. After a while, though, a few questions have started to creep into your mind. Why is the building located where it is? How did that stairway end up there? Why are the lounges and laundry facilities placed where they are? Why did someone decide that triples were a good idea? Why do we have so many study lounges? How does all of this affect the student experience? And why didn’t they teach this in school?
These are all good questions. After all, there must be some reasoning behind all those decisions that the architects, engineers, contractors, and senior housing officers are making. However, to the emerging professional, the design process can be a complex maze of specialized language, processes, and tools, all used to describe a range of technical, conceptual, and logistical issues unfamiliar to most. But how does a housing professional with a head full of student affairs theory and practice begin to see the method behind the design process madness and start to learn how it comes together?
Regardless of their role, housing professionals must understand and be able to articulate the impact that the physical environment has on the student experience. Participation in the design process is essential to advocating for student well-being and ensuring that the student experience is central to the design solution. By gaining this insight into the considerations that shape the design process, housing professionals can add their values and voices to the finished product in a beneficial manner and can have a dramatic impact on the built environment, ultimately benefiting generations of students.
With all that said, how does a housing professional start to demystify this process? Certainly, if there is a new building project on campus, advocating to be involved (even if it’s just shadowing a few project meetings) is a practical way to begin to visualize the who, what, and why of it all. If that is not available, though, one must find other options. One of the first exposures for some professionals came through a design exercise held at the Northwest Association of College and University Housing Officers annual conference. A conference mainstay since 2018, this collaboration between the NWACUHO board and the Mahlum Architects firm (with offices in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington) offered an immersive, behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to construct or renovate a residence hall.
This program, called the Advancing Professionals Challenge, is almost like an intense Behind Closed Doors case study, but, rather than crisis management and conflict resolution, it is based on best practices, building blocks, and budget meetings. The exercise begins with participants being divided into teams and partnered with an architect. Then the specifics of the challenge are announced. For example, the teams may be tasked with designing a new multi-level residence hall on a dense, urban site at a local university. In addition, they may be asked to consider important overarching themes such as environmental stewardship, accessibility, or community building. Their minds start swirling as they must consider complex site restrictions, deliver the desired program type and project goals, and stay within a fixed budget. When the exercise is complete, the teams present their design concepts to a group of senior housing officers, who then evaluate the overall design solution, assessing details like community layout, target resident type, room type, number of beds, support amenities, building area, and total cost.
What makes this challenge valuable is that the steps taken are remarkably similar to what happens with a real-world project. The process begins as the team members collaborate with participating design and construction professionals to determine what they would build. Faced with the goal of envisioning a project program and determining a community scale that would be appropriate to meet the needs of the students and the institution, this is where a housing professional’s contribution can really shine.
While the housing professionals on a project team won’t have all the answers, there is still much they can contribute, and their value only grows with a deeper understanding of the considerations, challenges, and trade-offs that come in designing a new building.
To set the foundation for what is to come, several factors need to be considered during this early programming stage. What type of rooms will this hall have and how large will they be? After all, most hall real estate is dedicated to sleeping areas, so it is vital to establish this. Is the intent to maximize the number of residence hall-style beds, offer market-rate apartment-style accommodations, or a combination of both? Will this hall host first-year students, affinity-based housing, upper-division, or graduate students? This determination likely will depend on the type of students the institution wants to (or needs to) house, the demand for housing based on enrollment trends, and how this project will complement the rest of the institutional housing portfolio.
Once the housing portion of the program is established, the rest of the building can begin to fall into place. One of the earliest parameters that must be set is the hall’s total number of students. This information will impact the building’s height and footprint. Next is the consideration of what major building systems are needed. Will the building have air conditioning, or is heating sufficient? What about backup power? How will bathrooms be arranged? Are there other space types in the building, such as a dining facility, that have special requirements?
In addition to these nuts and bolts issues (not to mention the pipes, ducts, wires, fixtures, lighting, and more), the housing staff must also convey to the architectural team what type of community and amenity spaces the housing project requires to support the needs of today’s students. These spaces are critical elements for community development, but features like music practice or fitness spaces, classrooms, lounges, and recreational areas also come with significant budget implications. Understanding whether a campus has established principles or a basis-of-design for these types of spaces can affect the latitude that a design team has. Finally, how are the values and principles of equity, sustainability, and accessibility reflected in the design?
As the design gels, it’s essential to consider whether the hall, as it is imagined, can actually be built. To determine this, the different teams, with their design concepts in hand, begin to consult with the contractors at the conference to verify that the design can be constructed within the given budget. Contractors evaluate and discuss constructability considerations with the teams, including identifying problematic design elements such as non-stacked units, long-lead or expensive materials, and accelerated schedule requirements. In the real world, this would require a lengthy series of meetings, memos, proposals, and counter-proposals. As the old saying goes, there aren’t many problems that can’t be resolved with time or money, but in most – if not all – construction or renovation projects, both of those resources are finite. Therefore, teams must make value-based tradeoffs to mitigate concerns, align the proposed project with its budget, and determine a reasonable construction schedule.
Finally, the teams determine the type of furnishing and services to put the finishing touches on their communities. Again, competition participants engage with industry vendors by visiting them at their conference booths to learn what options are available to help the institution deliver a successful living experience. With budget limits still at play, teams then evaluated whether some services could be negotiated or if there were cost-sharing opportunities. How is this value passed on to the students, and how does it impact the ongoing cost of housing?
Armed with all these ideas and information, the design teams come together with their paper, markers, and models to create their ideal residence hall. For the competition, these final projects were presented to a panel of senior housing officers for feedback. If this was an actual project, it would be the campus administrators reviewing the work. Regardless, the old adage in construction to measure twice and cut once rang true. It’s difficult and expensive to get a do-over. Time spent planning will pay off when it comes time to break ground and start to put up walls, ensuring that the building truly meets the needs of the students and the institution for the long term.
While the housing professionals on a project team won’t have all the answers, there is still much they can contribute, and their value only grows with a deeper understanding of the considerations, challenges, and trade-offs that come in designing a new building. Once a housing professional develops a design competency and applies it to real-world challenges of hall construction, they can better contribute to projects, positively impact the built environment, and improve the students’ experience. In the end, that’s a winning situation for everyone.
Josh Gana is director of operations for housing & food services at the University of Washington in Seattle. Kurt Haapala is a partner with Mahlum Architects Inc. based in Portland, Oregon.
