Edu-leaders

Which is the period of life that you remember the most? C.N. Raghavendran, the partner at the Chennai-based architecture and engineering firm, CR Narayana Rao (CRN), says, “I spent five years as a student at IITKharagpur. If you ask me which was the best period of my life, I would say my time at the IIT.”

Decades later, Raghavendran has had the opportunity to play an important role in shaping that experience for students across the country. His designs have transformed hostels at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Madras, Mahatma Gandhi University in Calicut (now Kozhikode), and at many more such campuses. “The hostel experience is important for students. It need not be fancy, but it needs to be memorable,” he remarks.

Hiked land prices are starting to squeeze the ambitions of private campuses that do not have the benefit of government-provided land. Added to that is the trend of students increasingly opting for off-campus paying guest or apartment accommodations, says Shobha Mishra Ghosh, the director of education at Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). Though these are often more expensive, students find more privacy and better services off-campus, Ghosh adds.

A combination of these factors are pushing universities, both in India and overseas, to add amenities, innovate with design, and raise the bar. “In this global world, we have to provide a basic comfort that is available to all,” says Ghosh. The latest buzzword on campus is thus “community”: how to create it, sustain it and make sure students are included in it.

Privacy At A Premium
Administrators and architects agree that today’s students have a set of expectations. “They look for better facilities. Whether they have it back at home is irrelevant,” says Raghavendran. Expectations range from 24-hour electricity, water and goes farther.

When Manipal University Vice Chancellor Raj Warrier joined office 45 years ago, the best room on campus had an attached bathroom—shared by five. “Today’s students are sophisticated,” says Warrier, noting the demands for airconditioners and single-seat rooms.

Though students may aspire to such amenities, a university knows that many may not be able to afford them. To meet diverse students’ needs, Manipal has evolved a tiered hostel system, in which room rates vary from Rs 34,000 (for a three-seat, non-air-conditioned room with common toilet) to almost Rs 190,000 a year (for a single room with separate study, kitchenette and attached toilet). Despite the high prices, Warrier clarifies that the university just manages to break even on hostel revenue. “India is a democratic country, we are a democratic university. It’s like anywhere. If you can afford it, you can get it,” he says.

While FICCI’s Ghosh does not sub-scribe to the practice of providing “hierarchies” of housing (making exclusions for married students or post-doctorals), she concedes that in a country as large as India, a variety of facilities are bound to come up. “I think the market can absorb the differences and there is room for all,” she says.

Michael Schultz, the president of the US-based Association of College and University Housing Officers-International (ACUHO-I), reports a similar trend. More “apartment-style” dorms are being built with shared kitchens and living spaces. He says, “We are also seeing a trend towards privacy. Seventy-two percent of the space in the last building I inaugurated, comprised private bedrooms.”

Structure And Social Life
With more students hailing from nuclear families, educators need to remember the importance of social interactions. Schultz has considered this issue, and comments, “There is always the dilemma of giving students what they want—privacy—and what helps them develop—community.”

Amity University Chancellor Atul Chauhan agrees, pointing out that hostels allow students to “make friends and develop into personalities capable of independent judgment and competent to handle day-to-day pressures of life.”

In CRN’s hostel designs for IITMadras, hostel buildings accommodating over 1,000 students each were broken down into large spaces. Rooms were built around these spaces, linked by hallways. Raghavendran explained that the spacious rooms encouraged social interaction and “could be used for assembly, lectures or entertainment.”

Fostering Communities
One important aspect of building an effective campus community is making room for activities outside the classroom. Chauhan reports that Amity’s hostels (for over 8,000 students)provide yoga classes, a shooting range, a horse riding academy, a swimming pool and basketball, badminton, squash, volleyball and tennis courts at no extra charge. Some like Indian School of Business and Sharda University also offer on-campus recreational and housekeeping services.

Not that students only focus on the fancy. When Nandita Badami, a secondyear MA student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, started her university and hostel hunt, her needs were practical. For Badami, a crucial factor was proximity. She calculated the time it would take her to walk to class with a laptop. “Certain cost-benefit analysis is required,” she admits.

Designing For Context
But, a five-star facility is only one side of the coin. What does it take to build a hostel that is comfortable, but not necessarily fancy? Raghavendran, who set out to achieve a balance through his IITMadras designs, reports:

• Maximise space and avoid the cramped rooms of the past.

• Maintain a connection to green areas outside and the environment in general. Provide for ventilation.
• Create spaces that allow privacy, even in shared rooms.

• As hostels grow in vertical height, ensure they do not look, or feel, intimidating.

• Consider parking facilities for motorcycles and bicycles.

In his designs, Raghavendran incorporated large central courtyards to draw the city’s hot breeze away from buildings, and to create a relaxed space. Windows were on opposite walls to facilitate crossventilation. Beds were purposely placed in this path for cooling at night. An equal amount of planning went into the bathroom design. The fact that most hostel lavatories are shared, puts a premium on hygiene. CRN’s designs placed the toilets in either the east or west-facing portions of the building, enabling them to receive direct sunlight, which killed germs and helped the floor to dry quicker.

The CRN team also interacted with 100-odd students and solicited their ideas while planning the hostel. The students’ first request was for a laundromat, as they were “tired” of washing in buckets. Their request compelled the management to look at the cost and, eventually, approve the feature. The second unique feature rose during consultations with the female students—extra closet space. “Girls require creative wardrobe space,” admits Raghavendran. An extra two feet of closet space was included in the girls’ rooms, in addition to the existing four feet.

Space-Starved Campus
While students may be getting larger closet spaces thanks to responsive designers, Indian universities are often short of real estate, especially in urban areas. To combat this scarcity urban US universities such as Emerson College (Boston), have done away with the classical notion of a campus and houses students, classrooms and libraries in buildings scattered across the city.

While Columbia University in New York has a central campus, its 18 residence halls are spread across a 10-block radius. “The nature of an urban university, like Columbia, is that its facilities are an integrated part of Morningside Heights and New York City,” says Robert Hornsby, the director of media relations at Columbia. The campus allows for the “best of both worlds”. Students are able to enjoy the experience of NYC living, while being connected to a traditional campus environment.

Indian colleges are also being forced to change their designs in response to land issues. According to Raghavendran, the average private college prefers to plan academic buildings first and preserve space for academic growth. Since facilities, such as labs, are hard to build across several floors, hostels are increasingly becoming the taller portions of campus.

Building Up
Even a campus like IIT-Madras, with acres at its disposal, prefers to build its hostels vertically in order to preserve green space. Earlier, campus buildings were limited to two to three floors, plus the ground level. Now, Raghavendran says, plans are on to build seven floors (plus the ground level). Though taller, buildings are still not higher than 30 metres. This is due to a National Building Code of India norm that mandates extensive fire safety measures above that height, which can add significantly to costs. Raghavendran estimates that high rises are 10 to 15 percent more expensive to construct than low-rise buildings. But, he points out, “The extra spent on buildings is a pittance compared to what is spent on land.”

Future Of Hostel Design
With all the technological changes entering a student’s life, it is inevitable that hostels will change too (see box). The ACUHO-I held a conference and design contest in 2007-08 documenting innovative and winning ideas being implemented in campuses.

The winning entry from Jonathan Levi Architects (JLA) of Boston, Massachusetts, featured a modular hostel filled with stackable rooms, fold-out beds and a one-piece sink and toilet. Jonathan Levi, the principal of JLA, explained, “Fixed arrangements imply boundaries and inhibit spontaneous adaptations to new forms of knowing and communicating. Flexible arrangements help blur boundaries and accommodate the spontaneous groupings needed to support change and invention.”

Already some US campuses are installing beds that fold up into walls to save space. Rice University, in Houston, Texas, used pre-fabricated bathroom“pods” made of sustainable materials to reduce the construction costs. Many universities now offer full Wi-Fi connectivity—a development that has led to new thinking about room design such as interactive, smart-media walls in rooms.

Another winning design in the ACUHO-I contest was by a group of young professionals from the US and China, which worked under the direction of senior architects of Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas + Company in Norfolk, Virginia. The team’s design, with movable, shutter-like walls, allowed students to create their private and public spaces within an existing building. They wrote that the future hostel is “about students’ new way of living and learning, about the impact of new technologies, about new methods of exchange, and new social relationships in an everchanging information age.” Perhaps in this case, the journey and the destination are one and the same.