Back to School: The Enduring Appeal of Dorm Life in the United States
One of the major themes of Carla Yanni's beautifully researched, written, and illustrated recent book, Living On Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory, is that of control: the dormitory—and more broadly, the dwelling—as a form of social pedagogy. American colleges, from the very start, at Harvard University in the seventeenth century, supplied housing, and designed housing, as a way to mold their students—sometimes to assuage the concerns of their parents, always to benefit the institution.
College leaders used dorms to exclude on the basis of race, separating students of Indigenous and African descent from those of European. They used dorms to address concerns about class, including by curbing the autonomy of the well-to-do by wresting power from fraternities (where most affluent students lived). They used dorms to police behavior, especially around courtship, by determining how, when, and where men and women socialized; to foster social cohesion and cohorts; and to protect students from scourges, real or perceived, of off-campus alternatives, like the boarding house. College is a bounded community. Dorms bound it yet tighter.
Figure 1. Peabody Square, Blackfriars Road, London, developed by the Peabody Trust, designed by architect Henry Astley Darbishire, 1871. Source: Illustrated London News, 1872.
Learning about these efforts from Yanni draws to mind how parallel impulses have shaped other housing efforts in the United States (and beyond), especially where we find similar social anxieties or imbalances of power. This is particularly true in the world of reform housing and, more broadly, apartments.
Patrolling Social Housing
Like dorms, philanthropic housing and, later, public housing reproduced the racial barriers common to the private housing market. But model and public housing also attempted to exercise control in other ways—ones that echo collegiate efforts to reshape the quotidian.
Figure 2. Promotional brochure for Riverside Buildings, Brooklyn, developed by Alexander Tredway White's Improved Dwellings Company, designed by architect William Field, 1891. Courtesy Frances Loeb Design Library, Harvard University.
As in dorms, with their faculty advisors and RAs, social housing enforced norms and expectations not only through contracts (such as a lease) but through the physical presence of an authority figure. These included "friendly visitors" such as Octavia Hill, and later social workers, who collected rent (weekly, in person) as well as movement leaders who stationed themselves to steer communities, like Abraham Kazan of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, who lived in what he built, or Lewis Mumford at Sunnyside Gardens.
And just as college administrators used dorms as a tool of social engineering—pairing roommates from different (or, in some case, similar) backgrounds; calibrating the balance of public and private spaces to enhance feelings of fellowship—social-housing providers sized and arranged rooms to make it difficult for tenants to take in home-work and, more important, extended family and boarders. More broadly, providers promoted normative middle-class ideals of house as haven for nuclear-family domesticity. Playground, libraries, and more further attempted to isolate tenants from commercial entertainment, vice, and other aspects of working-class urban life that worried reformers.
Often, social housing borrowed physical forms from dorms toward these ends—namely the "staircase," or stairway-and-quad, plan, in which buildings are arranged around capacious landscaped green spaces and circulation is accomplished through a series of stairways, each opening up to small number of living spaces at each floor.
“With college towns now becoming a popular place to retire, perhaps someday soon we’ll all be living on campus.”
Big-city reform housing in the United States, especially in New York, emulating London examples, employed these arrangements for decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Figures 1 and 2). Most market-rate apartment complexes of that era, by contrast, featured more open C-, U-, E-, and T- plans.
Racial Uplift
Figure 3. "Corner of Garden" at Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments, New York, developed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., designed by architect Andrew Jackson Thomas, 1927, from original sales prospectus. Courtesy Frances Loeb Design Library, Harvard University.
The Paul Laurence Dunbar co-operative apartments, one of several projects of this physical and social type built in the late 1920s in and around New York by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (others include Thomas Garden Apartments, Rockefeller Garden Apartments, Brooklyn Garden Apartments, Van Tassel Apartments, and Bayonne Housing), offers an especially vivid example of the confluence of campus and reform housing.
A major goal for Rockefeller, as I've written elsewhere, was to create an environment less susceptible to social and physical decay than ordinary speculative housing so as to nourish his intended clientele: what the New York Urban League referred to as Harlem's "reputable" families.
To help do this, Dunbar's design emphasized control, surveillance, and intimacy, despite the complex's vast size, of 511 apartments, by embracing the stairway-and-quad plan. Dunbar also reversed the orientation of the complex so that stairs were reached from within the quad, itself accessible only through a limited number of controlled entry points, recalling arrangements common to apartment houses in many European cities but rarely employed Stateside (Figure 3).
Figure 4. The honor roll at Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2010.
As if to emphasize the connection to campus, Dunbar's primary entrance explicitly recalled the arched entryways of many of Oxford University's colleges, which were crucial reference points for U.S. dorm design. And although Dunbar's entryway had no elaborate porters lodge as at Oxford, it did, at some point (like other philanthropic housing complexes) add an Honor Roll, suggesting the project's didactic intent (Figure 4). I've found no mention of the honor roll in the records. But it's easy to imagine Rockefeller's manager—a Harvard-educated African American man who, like a settlement-house director, staged improving classes for tenants on parenting, decorating, and etiquette—using it to reward owners for "good" behavior, especially that which would reflect well upon, and elevate, the "race." (Never mind that Dunbar homeowners included such eminently capable individuals as Paul Robeson, A. Philip Randolph, and W.E.B. DuBois!)
Racial and Ethnic Exclusion
Dorm-type designs were not limited to social housing. In the same era, market-rate housing began to employ similar models, although without the reverse orientation and toward a somewhat different end: ethnic and racial exclusion.
Figure 5. Interior garden at Cambridge Court, Jackson Heights, New York, a partial perimeter block (note open end in distance) developed by Queensboro Corporation, designed by architect George H. Wells (following a general site plan created by Andrew Jackson Thomas) with landscape design by Olmsted Brothers, 1923. Photograph by Brown Brothers n.d. Courtesy Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s, Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, New York Public Library.
The architect of Dunbar (and Rockefeller's other complexes) was Andrew Jackson Thomas. A few years earlier, Thomas had begun designing apartment complexes around enclosed quads for another client: the Queensboro Corporation, which was building a new apartment colony, Jackson Heights, at a greenfield site in suburban Queens.
Figure 6. Display advertisement for Jackson Heights, Queens Corporation, New York Times, Aug. 6, 1922.
Responding to the Red Scare that followed World War I and to the need to imbue Jackson Heights with a marketable sheen that would appeal to upper-middle-class buyers (Queensboro marketed Jackson Heights' apartments on a for-sale basis), Thomas created the "garden apartment" perimeter block, with richly landscaped gardens, some designed by pedigreed firms like Olmsted Brothers (Figure 5).
That the complexes recalled college—at least of the highbrow sort donors like Edward Harkness were then cooking up for Harvard and Yale universities—was not lost on Queensboro. It often alluded to college in its ads, including one that reads: "Men and Women, during their 'prep' school and college years, lead an active life. Their later life, in the big ‘City’ means that they become engrossed in their affairs. . . . At Jackson Heights, where the City and Country merge, they have Golf, Tennis, Horseback Riding and other phases of the healthful outdoor life right at their door" (Figure 6). The complex also "had" racial exclusion. As other ads asked, "Who are your neighbors?" Queensboro did not sell apartments to Jews or Catholics, let alone people of color, for decades.
Policing Sexuality
A second major theme of Yanni's book is the U.S. dorm as tool for shaping the transition from childhood to adolescence, including courting. Benjamin Franklin, Yanni reveals, recognized that in a heterogeneous and fluid society such as the United States, the most important point of college was (and one could argue still is) to allow—or encourage—members of the ruling class to form bonds of friendship and marriage (in the case of men's college by meeting one another's sisters).
Figure 7. Display advertisement for Beekman House, New York, unbuilt, proposed by Walter Russell and the National Rent Mutual Corporation, designed by architects Warren & Clarke and Thomas Markoe Robertson, New York Times, November 4, 1923.
This dynamic is perhaps one of the reasons why U.S. experts like psychiatrists by the early twentieth century supported efforts to infantilize college students, in part by providing room and board (meals). On the Continent, university students were treated as adults, and rarely housed, as had been the case for centuries. In the U.S., experts argued, they were "prolonged adolescents."
Again, however, this impulse was not limited to college. As U.S. society grew rich enough to allow unattached middle-class adults—increasingly with college educations, both men and women—to live in cities on their own, beyond the confines of family and institutions like hotels, real-estate operators floated the idea of dorm-style apartment houses offering small, kitchenless studios with shared kitchens and lounges on each floor, and more freedom than the YMCA or a boardinghouse (Figure 7). The Then came Depression, World War II, and the baby boom.
But as the Greatest Generation and the first Baby Boomers reached adulthood, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the "singles" complex emerged. It appeared first in the freewheeling social atmosphere of Southern California, where small-time landlords found that to avoid unprofitable levels of turnover among men—who made up a majority of tenants able to afford their own apartment—complexes had to maintain a certain share of women. To attract and retain women, owners had to make women—and their parents—feel safe: from crime, but also their own sexuality.
Figure 8. Resident manager with tenants at South Bay Club singles complex, Torrance, California, developed by R&B Development, designed by Robert H. Skinner, 1965. Photograph by Don Ornitz, 1967. Courtesy LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection, U.S. Library of Congress.
Figure 9. The quad at South Bay Club Torrance, Torrance, California, developed by R&B Development, designed by Robert H. Skinner, 1965. Photograph by Don Ornitz, 1967. Courtesy LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection, U.S. Library of Congress.
The solutions were supervision—in this case by property managers who were always middle-aged women: single, widowed, or divorced—and access-controlled stairway-and-quad plans, with courtyards now devoted to pools, tennis courts, and glass-fronted gyms (Figures 8 and 9).
Fun and Freedom
Singles complexes also draw attention to another aspect of U.S. dorms: growing middle-class insistence on—and resources to pay for—luxury and recreational services during the new extended adolescence. Like dorms, singles complexes aspired to not just be places to sleep, but to live. As Yanni's also written about, on PLATFORM, they didn't just house: they entertained.
They also promised similar freedom from day-to-day adult responsibilities. Many, for instance, offered furnished apartments, utilities, and month-to-month leases.
Interestingly, while the singles fad faded with in loco parentis, the originator of the idea quickly transformed its complexes into a new type that remains one of the fastest growing segments of the housing market today: the furnished "corporate" apartment, which, as Max Hirsh discusses, has become an especially popular type in East Asia (fig 10).
Figure 10. Oakwood Apartments, Crystal City, Virginia, 1987. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner 2019.
Alongside more recent iterations, such as so-called co-living, which offers furnished or unfurnished bedrooms in a suite with a shared living room and kitchen, all-in-one rents, and on-site programming, the dorm has reemerged as powerful model for middle-class urban housing. With college towns now becoming popular places to retire, perhaps someday soon we'll all be living on campus.
