Local architects have winning ideas for dorms of the future

NORFOLK

A college student one day turns away from her desk, opens a wall of her dorm room so she can sit on an open ledge to chat with students passing in the hallway.

She programs a solar-powered flat-panel-screen exterior wall to display art or photos from her computer. Other students do the same in their rooms, giving the building a changing, personalized face.

She can peer over her hallway rail into a shopping mall-like atrium to see what others are doing, curl up alone to read in a nook designed for seclusion, or attend a class or lecture or show downstairs in flexible spaces.

That could be - and should be - the college dorm of the future, said a team of four young architects from Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas + Company in downtown Norfolk. A contest jury of designers and educators agreed last month, awarding them $25,000 in the 21st Century Project Design Showcase competition, sponsored by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International.

The local team, calling itself net+work +camp+us, worked under the premises that learning isn't confined to classrooms, that students gather information in new ways, and that casual student interaction is educational in itself.

"Every space is a potential learning space," said Suping Li, one of the team members.

Local students applauded the ideas, even if they were a little leery of overexposure.

"That being open to your room like that - that could be a problem," said Ashley Peterson, a Norfolk State University sophomore from Suffolk. Nevertheless, she said she liked the possibilities for interaction.

"Most of the time, people will be in other people's dorm rooms, anyway," she said. "Instead of having to get out of your dorm room, and walking across campus, you could just meet in, like, your own lobby, your own dorm room."

The modular, prefabricated components of the winning concept add more community spaces to the traditional dorm and blur lines between dorm rooms and hallways, hallways and public spaces, and public places and outdoor courtyards and amphitheaters.

The openness "also increases security," Li said. "Because if some stranger is there, you could sense them."

In those flexible public places, a professor could hold a class one day, said Robert Reis, who advised the team. "The very next day, we may have an international student forum, or we have a barbecue."

Materials and configuration could change as climate or location required: brick, street-level storefronts in an urban setting; wider, shade-producing overhangs in the sunny Southwest. The rooms above would be topped by public and private roof areas covered in plants, which also help with energy costs.

Among the most noticeable innovations: "cafe walls" of operable shutters between rooms and halls, with wide sills for sitting. They were inspired by coffee shops and a University of Virginia friend of team leader Yang Tian. The friend noted how many in his dorm kept their room doors open so they could see and talk with hallway passers-by.

The team's proposal "had what we refer to as the right amount of 'stretch ' " - not so outlandish that no one would try it, but different enough that it would be worth trying, said James Baumann, director of communications and marketing for the housing officers association.

And while its dorm is only conceptual so far, the team said it already has been contacted by the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

For Shelanda Mitchell, a Norfolk State freshman from New York, the future dorm idea was "awesome" but also "chaotic."

"It is going to be so much going on," she said.

"You wouldn't be sheltered," said her twin sister, Eulanda. "My professor was saying yesterday that people need to get out of the box and communicate."

Matthew Bowers, (757) 222-3893, matthew.bowers@pilotonline.com