Fostering Community at U. of C.

Dorm Has 8 ‘Houses’ Under Three Roofs

by Elaine Schmidt

Dorm life isn’t what it used to be.

When the University of Chicago’s 375,000-sq-ft, three-tower residence hall opens at the beginning of the 2009-2010 academic year, its rooms will bear little resemblance to the concrete cubicles of previous academic generations.

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Indeed, the facility bears a hint to the British educational system with its “colleges” and “houses.”

The $165 million project formally called the New Residence Halls and Dining Facility will create coeducational housing for 811 undergraduate students at 61st Street and Ellis Avenue. The two eight-story towers and one 10-story tower, which still are not named, are divided into two residence halls, each with its own common room.

The H-shaped residence halls, in turn, are divided into four “houses” each smaller units within the larger structures for a total of eight. The houses are insular and inclusive in design and function.

“Every house is heterogeneous” because majors and grade levels are mixed, says Lisa Ferreira, project manager with Boston-based Goody Clancy, the project architect. But at the same time “every student at the university has to take the same core curriculum. It’s a rigorous system a classical education.”

The Chicago office of the Providence, R.I.-based Gilbane Building Co., is the construction manager on the project, and Michael Houston, senior project manager, says the majority of the towers’ exteriors are clad in Indiana limestone that is a visual trademark of the Hyde Park campus.

Each house contains a variety of room styles, from simple double rooms for first-year students more spacious suites for third- and fourth-year students. The graduated room sizes are designed to encourage students to remain in student housing throughout their academic experience.

The graduate students that serve as heads of the resident houses also dine with the students in the house, and the two residence halls contain living space for two faculty members and their families, Ferreira adds.

Ferreira refers to the design challenges of creating two halls and eight distinct houses within the structure’s three towers as something akin to working a Rubik’s Cube.

“Every house had to have a certain number of rooms and suites as well as accessible rooms and suites, and the same number of toilets,” she says. “The bed count had to be similar from house to house and they each had to have features in common and some uniqueness.”

Within each house, stairways connect just the floors of that particular house, furthering the sense of community through chance meetings. Among the biggest design issues was making the house stairways comply with Chicago building codes and getting through the permitting process, Ferreira says.

“The house system and open house stairs were really critical to foster a sense of community,” Ferreira says. “It was finally accepted that each stairway was an atrium with atrium exhaust and windows that open automatically when the atrium exhaust is triggered.”

The houses are not segregated from each other. Students can walk through the building and pass from house to house, with color schemes and other visual clues used to distinguish the houses.

House Lobbies

The house lobbies were a design challenge, Ferrerira says.

“Everyone who comes into the residence hall has to pass through the same front door, for security,” she says. “From that point they go outside through a courtyard to the front lobby of their house.”

Five of the houses have their front lobbies, two-story spaces that function as living rooms, on the ground floor. The other three houses have their lobbies spaces on upper floors, accessible by express elevators. Each of the house lobbies has a kitchen space and a television.

Ferreira says the university programs these spaces heavily, with pizza nights, study breaks and other events.

The structures themselves, which are flanked by a single-story dining hall, are clad in the Indiana limestone as well as a traditional metal and glass curtain wall system.

Gilbane’s Houston says the limestone is applied as a rain screen system. Rain screens are actually panels of limestone that are joined without mortar or sealant, leaving an air gap between the limestone and the building itself, as well as at the top and bottom of the wall.

“That air space breathes,” he says. “It’s designed to get moisture to the bottom of the wall.”

Ted George, associate with Goody Clancy, adds, “The Indiana limestone panels are attached to an aluminum subframe that’s supported to each floor by an insert at the edge of the floor slab.”

The 2- by 4-ft panels of 2-in.-thick limestone are attached to the aluminum frames by stainless-steel connections to reduce reactions between the limestone and the aluminum.

“The rain screen doesn’t have closed joints,” George says. “There are no sealants between the joints. Rain is allowed to go through the gaps and evaporate. It’s essentially a ventilated facade.”

The small amount of rainwater that will pass through the joints between the limestone panels will run down the backside of the limestone in the space between the panels and the building, where it will evaporate.

George says the advantage of the rain screen system over traditional sealed-joint cladding is long-term maintenance savings.

“The idea is that in a tall building, having to replace the sealants between the stone is a time-consuming and expensive process,” he adds. “This will save the $1.2 million that it would cost to replace the sealants.”

Granite is a more typical material for such a rain screen, but Indiana limestone is “a campus material,” he says.

Accommodating the limestone meant using specially designed anchors that are  larger than those used on granite and require a special drilling machine.

“The advantage to the panels is that they’re fabricated, brought onto the site on a truck and hoisted into place that day or the next, which reduces the staging required on the tight, urban site,” George says. It is also saves time and cost over hand installations performed from scaffolding, he adds.

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