Designing a Freshman Residence Hall for the Next Generation

Students go through a transition during the years of college. They enter as adolescents  and exit as adults. During these years, students should be introduced to an environment that will keep them safe, healthy, and encourage them to maintain a balance between work and life. Creating a safe space for students in college is especially important in this time since there are so many groups students belong to ranging from race, religion, gender identity, and sexual orientation. These areas should encourage students to be who they are and who they want to be without fear. Students also need to have a healthy body throughout college to go with their healthy mind. Taking care of one’s body in college can be challenging, but can be done right through nutrition, exercise, maintaining allergies, and avoiding toxicity. Lastly, students need to learn how to maintain a work-life balance throughout college in order decrease stress in already busy lives. Students need to manage time well to be productive in their work and have time for their own leisure. This transition can be made easier if prepared well in the beginning with the correct environment within their school. This leads to quality freshmen student housing.

The aim of this study is to find out how freshmen residence halls can facilitate trends of creating a safe space, maintaining health and wellness, and creating a work-life balance through architectural design. The way this will be done is through two methods: literary review and precedent study. Since the topic of what makes a good residential hall isn’t new, there is considerable research literature on the subject. This includes looking deep into the subcategories of the three main ideas. In regards to creating a safe space, issues of gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and race are looked into and how the respective campuses have these issues or solve them. For maintaining health and wellness, issues of nutrition, exercise, allergies, and toxicity are looked into to keep students healthy. Lastly, for creating a work-life balance, topics of productivity, leisure time, and support for students through living-learning communities are looked into. The precedent study will focus on exceptional residential facilities in the architectural press, dormitories that relate issue-wise to the literary study and the facilities of local colleges in the Buffalo area. Each campus that offers freshman housing has its own different room styles and amenities.

All this material will result in the design or renovation of a university residence hall in Buffalo: a freshmen residence hall for the next generation. It will feature different styles of rooms for students of diverse personalities, backgrounds, and preferences. This includes their own definition of privacy, community, and convenience. The implications of this study would be to improve freshmen housing in universities to better prepare freshmen students for the years ahead by helping them learn about themselves.

Redefining Valiasr Street Public Space for the Youth, Tehran, Iran

Leilasadat Mirghaderi

Public space by itself does not form a community; rather, a community is built by people who participate in community building activities. Despite being the capital city of Iran with so many public and semipublic spaces such as parks, restaurants, cafés and shopping malls, Tehran is still missing a dynamic and active public space. The current public spaces of Tehran suffer from dysfunctionality of features and lack of coexistence among users which make them unattractive for the young generation. In this age of communication, youth are looking for new experiences and they are eager to expand their social circle. Despite the rapid changes in social trends over the last few decades, there hasn’t been any significant changes in the design of public spaces of Tehran. This study will try to address this issue by providing a public space that could improve opportunities for the youth to interact with one another more easily.

The main focus of this study is to employ leisure and amusement as architectural programs to encourage the youth to participate in social interactions that are based on cooperation and social exchange. These activities should be within the boundaries of Islam which is the official religion of Iran. Valiasr Street which is one of Tehran’s significant historical streets is chosen as the area under study. Valiasr Street is a tree-lined street that divides the city into its eastern and western parts. It is one of the major paths for both pedestrians and motorists in need of improved public spaces. To address this issue, there is a need for gathering information (through a literature review, and an exploration of obtaining information from social media, and archival sources) about how users interact with a major public street, and with each other.  From that information I would like to develop information useful for design that will support social interaction of the youth in public spaces. A part of this study relies on social science to find trends and patterns in people’s behavior. Also historical research has to be used to study the past and present state of the area to develop a design for the future.

In this path, my goal is to find answers for the following questions: What kinds of activities encourage social interactions in young people? What factors of a place can transform passive users to active ones? What design features can prolong the duration of stay of the youth in a public space? The outcome of this study would most likely result in design features for a number of small scaled places that will make a dynamic environment to allow young generation pause for a few moments from their daily routines and socialize.