The World's Best Housing, but Not at Columbia

At Columbia this week, there's a grand social experiment about to happen. Some people will be in ecstasy; others will be driven to madness. It's the housing lottery, and the stakes are higher than you might think.

Don't mistake Columbia's little game as just a chance to bunk for the new school year. After all, the modernist architect Le Corbusier thought that people's surroundings determined the kind of citizens they were. With the irregular, unhygienic streets of Paris, there was poverty and misery. But on the glittery grids of Manhattan, there was prosperity and progress.

"Vehement silhouettes of Manhattan," he famously said, "that vertical city with unimaginable diamonds."

But one of his most famous buildings was the 1932 Swiss Pavilion dormitory of the University City in Paris. It was a great slab with a front wall mostly of glass, and blank brick walls on either side. Despite the dormitory's high ideals, it's known to Parisians as a hideous eyesore and a terrible place to live.

East Campus, anyone?

Housing is as much a part of the character of a university as its curriculum, students, and faculty. Universities spent over $7.5 billion building dormitories last year to accommodate burgeoning first-year classes, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. And as they do so, schools are struggling to create dorms and living arrangements to keep students in the frenetic environment of the modern university a little bit happier than they would be otherwise.

The Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago has just opened a brand new, high-tech dormitory. Designed by famed architect Helmut Jahns, the State Street Village has won accolades from critics around the world. And administrators said it has done wonders for the school's profile.

"Absolutely, people are generally in a better mood," said Jean Bingham, associate vice president of auxiliary services at IIT. "We're an urban campus. But where is the center of campus? Students didn't want to walk between buildings in the evening. Now everything is in the center. It's like going to a whole new school."

Of course, to achieve such an effect, the dormitory had to be pretty special. The new dorms and student center feature all-glass facades surrounding a high-tech train tunnel that runs through the building. Students have panoramic views from their sparse, modern quarters of Chicago's skyline and the campus's perfectly sculpted gardens.

Each room or suite has wireless Internet access and has phone and television jacks in every room, including the bathroom. Students can allow guests into the building via cameras over the Web. The laundry machines send e-mails or make telephone calls when they're ready. Each lobby of the dorm/student center has 52-inch plasma screens with high-definition TV and DVD players.

"It's really, really cool. Students seem very happy with it," Bingham said.

Perhaps the best part of the setup is that students get to keep their housing--"squatters' rights," Bingham calls it--from year to year. Unlike the annual lottery system, once you get a room you like, it's yours for good.

Columbia students know the stress of the lottery. Other schools, however, turn it into a positive experience. At Amherst College, a yearly lip sync contest determines the top pick for each class.

"People have done stuff like singing 'I Touch Myself' while wearing green glittery thongs and making out with a giant poster of President Bush. Last year, the winners danced to 'I Like Big Butts,'" said Anne McNamara, a senior from Chappaqua, New York.

The contest makes the lottery a community building experience rather than freak-out time. "It's a huge thing-- everyone goes," McNamara said.

The stakes in the lottery at Amherst, however, are higher than they are most places. The western Massachusetts campus features old fraternity houses converted into dorms, with working fireplaces, libraries, and king-size beds in gigantic singles.

There are many colleges where the housing is better than any Columbia student could dream. The Princeton Review ranked Loyola University of Maryland tops in its "Dorms Like Palaces" survey last year.

"Most of our dorms are renovated apartments that used to belong to other people," said Alex Talea, a sophomore from Long Island. "Everyone has kitchens, common rooms, and giant bedrooms. Living on campus is better than living off campus. I've never known anyone to have a bad experience."

Smith College was ranked second, and prides itself not only on the quality of the facilities, but on the camaraderie of living in a residential college system. Christine Quigless, a senior from North Carolina, had a living room, three closets, a bathroom, and a bedroom when she was a resident adviser. Having visited Columbia, she compared her single-occupancy residence to a Hogan suite.

But the real strength of Smith's housing, Quigless said, is the people. Students typically live in the same residential college for all four years. "The character of the house changes with the people who live there. They're your family."

There's also a downside to living in such close quarters. "Whenever anything goes wrong in a house, that affects everyone in the house and someone has to move out. I think that our surroundings are good, they harbor a family environment, but at the same time, when things happen, they hit hard. That's the catch," Quigless said.

At Stanford University, students seek out that kind of interdependence. It's a tradition to live off campus, on "The Row," in either self-ops or co-ops. In self-ops, the residents hire a full-time chef to cook whatever, whenever. Stanford provides the cleaning. In co-ops, students usually have gardens and gigantic kitchens, and they have to clean up after themselves.

"The co-op community extends beyond just the people in the house. They had co-op Olympic games. They really have to bond together because they're responsible for each other," said Antonio Mora, a Stanford graduate and an associate in the school's residential education department.

Similarly, at Columbia students have also bonded around a common affinity for beloved housing experiences.

"Fort Awesome," anyone?