Life in a Collegiate Bubble

How can landscapes make student housing feel like home?

At Mississippi State University, we recently put this question to a group of students. We’re collaborating there with Hanbury and McCarty Architects on plans for a new residence hall. At a stakeholder meeting last month, we posed the question and presented students with several image boards representing alternative paradigms for the design of campus landscapes. Many preferred landscapes with a traditional, collegiate feel (think: red brick, green lawns and stately trees). They want to live in a housing precinct that mirrors the high quality of materials and dignified restraint of Mississippi State’s iconic, historic spaces such as the Drill Field. “Celebrate the collegiate bubble,” said one student—drawing a connection between a “picture-perfect,” traditional style and the rarified experience of a student living on campus. Other students advocated for a landscape character that distills and abstracts the regional landscape. “If I moved here from Washington State, I want to feel like I’m in Mississippi when I’m outside enjoying the campus,” one student told us.

Interestingly, this echoes important feedback we’ve heard from students on other campuses around the country. At Clemson University, for instance, students have expressed a desire for more traditional collegiate landscapes for their core academic precinct, while preferring festive, playful spaces with lots of activity and bold color schemes for housing precincts. At the University of Richmond, students tell us they want to live amidst campus landscapes with a lush, biodiverse plant community (as a corollary to their ecological commitments), while at Grinnell College, when weighing in on a study of campus wellness resources, students gravitated towards big-sky spaces and native plant associations that evoke the spirit of the prairie.

While student preferences vary from one school to another, one theme is consistent: Landscapes play a fundamental role in defining campus character, grounding it with a local sense of place. And that’s something that students tell us matters greatly to them.

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