ABSTRACT
The majority of college students are still spending 70-80 percent of their time in residence halls that have little relation to their needs and desires. Administrators have been so preoccupied with problems of growth, costs and budgets that they have seldom bothered to question the basic assumptions of student housing design. A study by Burton Clark and Martin Trow identified four student subcultures on the American college campus—academic, collegiate, nonconformist and vocational. Many of the more recent college housing programs rely on the concept of "natural" social groupings as the basis for dormitory design. They assume that there are optimum group sizes for various activities, and that collections of small groups comprise progressively larger groups. In equipping the rooms for study, administrators and designers seem to have forgotten their own college days. Close communities of teachers and students can be created by building environments in which the two groups can live and work together.
