Whose idea was it that college dorm rooms, particularly those constructed in the 1960s onward, should resemble the practical, ugly environs of a prison?
It’s no wonder the rising costs of higher education (not to mention the proliferation of cheap but stylish products from IKEA and Target) have turned students and their parents into discerning customers when it comes to on-campus housing.
The Illinois Institute of Technology, on the south side of Chicago, re-sponded by hiring renowned architect Helmut Jahn to build a series of sleek residence halls, dubbed State Street Village. From the side, the glass-and-steel structures have a sloping, horseshoe like shape, in contrast to the older, blocky, yellow brick dorms across the lawn. The rooms themselves have a spare, modernist look, with unfinished cement walls and the clean lines of the brushed-metal furniture.
Even so-called fancy dorms can be somewhat institutional, but blank spaces inevitably breed ingenuity. We visited the new State Street Village dorms (which opened last year) to see what students are doing with their rooms.
The loft — that tried-and-true dorm classic — is still one of the most effective ways to create open space. Oksana Lasowsky, a sophomore electrical engineering major, raised her bed off the floor several feet to make room for her desk underneath.
“It keeps me focused,” she says. “I like to take naps. So if my bed is out of view, that’s a good thing.”
The four legs of the bed frame fit into hollowed-out grooves in 4-by-4-foot wood posts anchored in place by a series of bolts and two-by-fours. Lasowsky says she bought the loft-and-ladder set (and another that she plans to sell, sitting unassembled in the hallway) for $40 from her boyfriend’s roommate, who used them last year.
“He said he paid $100 for the lumber, so it was a good deal.” All Lasowsky had to do was piece the loft together. “It took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to put it together and an hour to build it.” (The school requires that a facilities manager look over and approve any build-outs, such as lofts, for safety purposes.)
All the rooms in the State Street Village complex have moveable furniture, including a large armoire for each student, and it can make for creative floor plans.
Lasowsky and her roommate, Hannah Cho, who live in a large corner room, positioned their wardrobes as a screen to separate the space and give each student privacy without cutting off the view north of downtown that can be seen through the floor-to-ceiling span of windows.
Privacy, always in short supply, was the guiding principal for Shan Colletti, a sophomore applied mathematics major, and her roommate Eri Suzuki, a sophomore architecture major. They created a small dressing area in the corner of the room by situating their armoires on either side of a dorm-issued bookshelf.
“People walk in when you’re getting dressed all the time,” says Colletti. Ah, yes, dorm life. “So we thought it would be cool to create a closet area that you can’t see when you walk in the door.” The set-up is a little cramped, but it does create a private walk-in nook for changing.
Amazingly, they also managed to fit a small twin-size futon and wooden frame in the room for overnight guests.
Of course, nothing quite compares to the bachelor pad setup in the room shared by sophomores Justin Olson, an architecture major, and Dan Wido, a bio-med major. The two bunked their beds to make space for a mini-living room area dominated by a 6-foot-long caramel-colored leather couch that faces their entertainment center, the wall of windows and that prime downtown view.
Once you sit down on this thing, there’s no getting up. “I’ve fallen asleep on there a couple times watching TV,” Olson admits.
Olson and Wido retrofitted the rolling desk chairs provided by the dorm and turned them into footstools by removing the back supports. (Both students brought their own ergonomically designed chairs for their desks.)
The rooms all have gray cement floors, but Olson and Wido have added a brown-and-white super-shag rug that has a ’70s-era Hugh Hefner vibe.
“This room was big enough to handle it,” Olson says, laughing at the detail of their setup.
“A couple of people want to buy that couch, I mean, offering a lot of money,” he adds, “but I can’t see parting with it.”
Hef would be proud.
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Then and now
Like the dorm residents, dorm rooms seem to move over the years. From the looks of rooms we revisited some 30-odd years after our readers lived in them., we figure you might not be hearing Joni Mitchell or Jimi Hendrix in them anymore.
