Eschewing the Suites In planning the new dorms, “we spent quite a bit of time looking at the mix of student rooms on campus,” says Wichroski. One outcome was a departure from longstanding practice: Long a staple in college residences were suites, several private bedrooms around a private living room. That concept was employed with gusto in the Residential Village, built in 1992. But the taste for suites has faded somewhat, both nationally and at Bates. Instead, the concept employed at 280 College Street and now in Kalperis and Chu is an outward-facing model featuring a “mix of singles and doubles, grouped in clusters that are broken up with common areas,” Wichroski says. These clusters allows friends to lodge near each other while encouraging them to socialize with other students in common areas, rather than holing up behind closed doors in their suite living room. Among the clusters at Chu
DOUG HUBLEY
The College Store on the first floor of Kalperis Hall.
and Kalperis are ones for first-year students, located on the second floor of each dorm.
Lounge Where? The residence at 280 College laid important groundwork for Kalperis and Chu halls in other ways. Taking the older residence as a baseline, student input on the new dorms suggested allocating less space for student bedrooms and applying the savings to common areas. They also made clear that what they want in their living space is flexibility — a diversity of environments to meet a diversity of learning and socializing styles. For instance, “students want to study in groups, and they want to study by themselves,” says Erin Foster Zsiga, head of residential life. “They need complete quiet so they’re not distracted, and they need to be around people.” In short, they want variety and they got it. “One of the things that’s really interesting is the fact that there are so many different common areas,” says Matt Phillips. There’s a common space for every personality and purpose. Spaces range in size from intimate nooks to the Treehouse, the sprawling fourth-floor lounge in Kalperis Hall that’s like a family rec room writ large.
Part of the Furniture Planning for the new residences included “exhaustive furniture testing” with students, Foster Zsiga says. Flexibility was the watchword for furniture, too — as applied both to the mix of items within rooms, and to specific models like the bedroom storage bins that can live either under the bed or stacked up, like a little bureau.
The lobby of Chu Hall.
JEREMY BITTERMAN
lanche of packages that arrives daily for students, “Post & Print along with the Campus Store will create a daily hub of activity and student traffic.” And not just students. The store and P&P are broadly useful businesses that, sooner or later, will draw in virtually everyone on campus — and they’re open to the general public, too. “That whole area is becoming a bit more of a center for campus, or at least is more heavily traveled than it has been in the past,” says Matt Phillips ’17 of Acton, Mass., residence coordinator for Chu Hall. “So it’s really nice to have lots of different spaces where people can hang out, even if you don’t live in the dorms.”