Nothing will keep dirty dishes and clothes from littering a typical dorm room, but a competition held by the Association of College and University Housing Officials-International last week focused on what changes will be made in the future to improve college housing, just as some new housing options are coming to AU.
Each entry in the competition was an individual dorm room design. The goals were to balance privacy and community, handle higher technological demands, create a flexible use of space and made of sustainable materials, according to the association.
The winning entry was a modular room that acts as its own unit, designed by Jonathan Levi of Jonathan Levi Architects in Boston. According to ACUHO-I, units would be purchased by a university and then stacked or fitted together to create an entire building.
The room would feature furniture that could be switched for a particular student's needs. For example, a kitchenette could replace an unneeded bed. Each room would also have its own bathroom, with a graded, water-repellant floor and walls that could turn from transparent to opaque to allow the entire bathroom to become a shower, according to ACUHO-I.
Another design predicted students would purchase their rooms online and have them shipped to school. One architect proposed rooms that would "flat-pack for travel" so students could take them to research sites or to study abroad programs. More ideas included walls that had different built-in combinations of furniture, moving walls so students could transform rooms into doubles, triples or quads and interactive media walls that students could personalize as often as they liked, according to ACUHO-I.
AU students suggested their own ideas of what the dorm rooms of the future will look like.
"I would hope the dorms of the future would be more capable of handling the electricity load of the technology students bring with them," Kristen Powell, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, said.
Caitlin Servilio, also a freshman in CAS, said she thinks the rooms, as well as the students, will make better use of technology. She said doors will have fingerprint-reading pads instead of keys and force fields that switch on and off and act as desks to conserve space.
Julie Rinehart, a sophomore in the School of Public Affairs, also said she thinks conserving space will be a main goal.
"Everything will fold out of the walls to save space," she said.
AU doesn't have anything quite as elaborate in the works, but the next addition to campus housing is scheduled to be available for students next fall, according to the Office of Housing and Dining.
Nebraska Hall, located behind the Katzen Arts Center on Nebraska Avenue, is currently being turned into a living facility similar to Park Bethesda, with single rooms in suites for up to four students. Each room would have a private bathroom, a feature seen consistently in the designs for the competition. The suites will be furnished and include kitchen appliances, according to the Office of Housing and Dining.
Rooms in Nebraska Hall will available to students based on number of credits, like rooms in Centennial. Tours will be available to students closer to room draw so students can view the living spaces before they decide to live there, according to the Office of Housing and Dining. Nebraska suites will be an option in room draw later this semester.
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