Below is the New York Times article mentioned above comparing the new MIT and Princeton dorms.

This is an Oxford building by the architect of the Princeton dorm:

http://www.magd.ox.ac.uk/looking_around/auditorium.shtml

And an article from Metropolis Magazine about the Princeton dorm:

http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0603/ob/ob01_0603.html

Dorm Style: Gothic Castle vs. Futuristic Sponge

The New York Times
November 20, 2002

The last time Princeton University significantly increased the size of its freshman class, in 1969, it needed to build a new dormitory -- fast. I. M. Pei designed an angular glass and concrete building, Spelman Hall, which went on to win a number of design awards.

Now Princeton is increasing its enrollment again, and the dorms it is planning could not be more unlike Spelman. The university is preparing to build a 500-bed residential college in the collegiate gothic style.

Picture ivy-covered stone walls, with archways, crenelations and gargoyles, reaching up to quaint slate roofs punctuated by gables and chimneys, and you have pictured collegiate gothic, a style with roots in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages.

Princeton's effort, which will require skilled masons to cut thousands of pieces of stone on the site, will cost more than $100 million, an astonishing $200,000 per bed. (In addition to dorm rooms, the buildings will include a dining hall, a library and a master's suite.)

That is about double what colleges typically spend on dormitory space. But in the world of elite colleges, it isn't the cost that is stirring controversy; it is the architecture.

William Mitchell, dean of the architecture school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has called Princeton's approach "silly" and "stultifying."

M.I.T. recently opened a new dorm of its own, with 350 beds, at a cost of $68 million -- just under $200,000 a bed. But that dorm, Simmons Hall, is by the New York architect Steven Holl, a modernist.

Dean Mitchell described Princeton's choice as "roughly the equivalent of requiring all e-mail to be written in Shakespearean English" and said it signaled "an astonishing lack of interest in architecture's capacity to respond innovatively and critically to the conditions of our own time and place."

The prime mover behind Princeton's new residential college is Meg Whitman, the president of eBay, a Princeton trustee and a member of the class of 1977. Ms. Whitman wrote, in an e-mail message -- without a hint of Shakespeare -- that her "fondest memories" of Princeton involved the old-style dorms in which she lived for four years.

"Collegiate gothic sets an ambience for learning that had a very positive impact on me," wrote Ms. Whitman, who, as if to prove her point, has pledged $30 million for the project, which will bear her name.

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture and a Princeton trustee, said she thought that collegiate gothic -- the style of Oxford and Cambridge Universities -- reminded students that they were "part of a long tradition of intellectual life."

Ms. Plater-Zyberk said that Princeton had by no means abandoned modern architecture. It is about to erect a science library designed by Frank Gehry, and has recently completed buildings by prominent modernists like Rafael Vinoly and Enrique Norten.

The problem, she said, was that, with so many modern buildings going up, "the beloved historic quadrant of the campus" was shrinking relative to the rest of the campus.

The solution, in the view of Princeton's director of physical planning, Jon Hlafter, was to create "campus neighborhoods," giving academic, administrative, athletic and residential buildings separate identities, each based largely on architectural style.

To design Whitman College, Mr. Hlafter chose Demetri Porphyrios, a Princeton graduate best known for designing a 1990's quadrangle at Magdalen College, Oxford, that blends in with the much older buildings around it.

Mr. Porphyrios will probably not be getting a call from M.I.T. The institute's new dorm is covered with a gridded concrete-and-metal facade (inspired, according to Mr. Holl, by a bathroom sponge). The futuristic, brightly colored building towers over the M.I.T. campus.

Inside, extra wide hallways are meant as places to spend time in. Common rooms are enclosed in multilevel spaces that evoke the inside of volcanoes.

Vikash Gilja, an M.I.T. freshman, had several complaints: the ladder to his raised bed fell apart (so he now climbs up on bookshelves). And the gridded facade gives his room 15 separate windows, meaning he has to adjust 15 curtains when he wants more or less sunlight.

In plan, Simmons is fairly conventional: lots of single rooms that open onto hallways, interrupted occasionally by common rooms. Double and triple rooms are going out of fashion, according to William Rawn, a Boston architect who is designing dormitories at Williams, Amherst and Swarthmore Colleges.

"More and more kids are coming from households where they have their own bedrooms and they are expecting to have the same in college," Mr. Rawn said.

In addition, he said, "Today's sexual mores are leading to the desire to have single bedrooms."

Mr. Rawn said a typical suite these days may have four single bedrooms, as opposed to the two doubles of a generation ago. The proliferation of singles raises the cost of construction. Then, because there are so many singles, Mr. Rawn said, the universities need more and bigger common areas, to foster a sense of community.

Mr. Rawn likes to create community by making hallways that attract students. An effective hallway, he said, is "so wide that it becomes like an urban street."

Another way to create community is to build dormitories around courtyards. Dean Mitchell of M.I.T. said that despite his dislike for the style, "the urban design principles underlying the collegiate gothic quadrangles are perfectly sensible."

At Princeton, suites of double and even triple rooms with fireplaces -- and long hikes to communal bathrooms -- were common in the dormitories built before World War II. The narrow buildings could not accommodate hallways. Instead, rooms were arranged around stairwells, called entryways, with their own doors to outside.

All these features will be missing from the new Whitman College. Fire regulations and disability laws effectively require hallways serviced by multiple stairways and elevators. Fireplaces are considered unsafe.

In plan, there is not that much difference between Simmons and Whitman. The gap is stylistic.

Most colleges, including New York University and Columbia, have avoided the extremes. N.Y.U.'s newest dorms, including one on the Bowery and several on East 14th Street, are innocuous, indistinguishable from the apartment buildings all around them.

Of course, few colleges can afford the Princeton-M.I.T. approach.

Mr. Rawn, the Boston architect, said colleges typically spend $100,000 or less per bed. "Princeton and M.I.T. have raised the bar," he said. Whitman will require 2,500 tons of stone, cut on the site and fit into load-bearing walls 16 inches thick. Simmons, by contrast, required thousands of perforated-wood ceiling panels, no two alike. In both cases, economies of scale were sacrificed to style.

In the dormitories he designs, Mr. Rawn prefers the middle ground. "All architecture," he said, "is about memory and invention. Each school has to find the right balance of those two things."

Posted by: E. Rauch on July 25, 2003 09:11 PM