Carla Yanni
Living on Campus
Did you live in a dormitory? Do you have fond memories of it, or were you plotting your escape from the moment you moved in? Many people live in residence halls during a transformational moment in their lives. And lots of people pay for their children to live in dormitories, too. But few stop to think about the way these everyday structures shape young lives.
Living on Campus is the first and only book that looks at the architectural history of this commonplace building type. I argue that college students dwelling together is not obvious or inevitable. Instead, it is an artifact of three centuries of American educational ideology that placed an outsized value on socialization.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, students were boys who needed moral guidance; in the nineteenth century, women began attending college in large numbers, always under protective eyes; as the concept of the adolescent emerged around 1900, youthful men were encouraged to delay adulthood; in the Fifties, they were GIs eager to re-enter society; in the Sixties, students were members of a youth culture that administrators almost feared.
This mad dash through the centuries is obviously oversimplified, and yet it nonetheless demonstrates that today’s students bear little resemblance to their forebears, which makes it all the more remarkable that the residence hall still thrives.
Lucy Diggs Slowe, Dean of Women at Howard University and a highly-regarded educator in the nascent field of student affairs (front row, fourth from the left) standing outside of the newly completed women’s dormitory with the national professional organization of deans of women in February 1932. The fact that the organization chose to stand with Slowe suggests the extent to which Howard was at the forefront of all universities, not just historically black colleges. And the fact that the deans of women posed in front of these state-of-the-art residence halls shows that they equated their work with the safe housing of their charges. Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
Postcard. Martha Cook Building, University of Michigan, 1915. Architects, York and Sawyer. On the garden side of this women’s dormitory, female students could use a generous terrace that stretched along the side of the long, thin rectangular structure, which had its main entrance on the street. Collection of the author.
Editor: Judi Pajo
Living on Campus
Carla Yanni Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory University of Minnesota Press 304 pages, 7 x 10 inches ISBN 978 1517904562
Available here →September 11, 2019
20190911-yanni-carla-on-book-living-campus-architectural-history-american-1-1
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Carla Yanni
Carla Yanni is a professor of architectural history in the Art History Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is the author of Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Her second book, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States, was as a 2007 “Book of Critical Interest” by the journal Critical Inquiry. Johns Hopkins University Press published her first book, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display. She holds a doctorate in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania.
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The American dormitory is an artifact of three centuries of educational ideology that placed outsized value on socialization.
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