STUDENT ACCOMMADATION
Creative space Communal and private spaces on campus by Michál Cohen, Director and Co-Founder, Walters & Cohen Architects
A
t its best, a campus is all things to all people. There should be quiet, secluded private living spaces, loud boisterous communal spaces and everything in between. Architects can help clients weave everything they need into their campus, from re-jigging existing spaces that could be working harder, to working out an ambitious 20-year masterplan. Our recent research with a university client has shown us that Covid has slightly changed what
34 | Spring 2022 | CAMPUS
students are looking for. In the past you would typically have your own private room plus common rooms, a bar and a dining room, with not much variety of spaces in between. Now university living – at least in first year – often happens in communities, where a small group of students occupy a floor or staircase within flats or a purpose-built house, each having their own room plus a shared kitchen-diner-living space. This prepares them for their second year, renting accommodation off campus. Those two models have
functioned very differently during the pandemic, once students were allowed back to their universities. Students in an older, larger college with 20 or 30 bedrooms on a floor wouldn’t have been able to use their JCR or dining hall, so were really limited to their own room, whereas those with a ‘cluster’ of 6-8 bedrooms and a small kitchen-diner-living area were able to form a ‘bubble’. So, although they weren’t able to go to a café or library, the second group of students were able to recreate those ‘community’ functions themselves.
